Heather Sackett did a good story this week on new data Brad Udall has been sharing that geographically parses the declines in streamflow across the Colorado River Basin. For folks like us down here in New Mexico, dependent on the San Juan as a critical source of supply, the news is not good: This month, …
One of the central questions dimly visible in the early discussions around the upcoming renegotiation of the Colorado River’s water operations and allocations rules is the question of how bad a “worst case” scenario should be considered. This is crucial, because it constrains what sort of questions must then be confronted. The lower the future …
At last week’s Getches-Wilkinson Center conference in Boulder, attorney Jay Weiner, who represents tribes (but was careful to say he was not speaking on any particular tribe’s behalf) made an important point, which is repeated in this excellent piece by Mark Armao this week in Grist: “The basin is free-riding off of undeveloped tribal water …
At last week’s Getches-Wilkinson Center conference on Colorado River stuff, I had the privilege of moderating a panel with the provocative title “Time to Get Real”. The opening remarks from Kathryn Sorensen of Arizona State University seemed worth repeating, and she kindly gave me permission to post on the blog (the pictures were her slide …
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The Bureau of Reclamation Colorado River team did something remarkable in yesterday’s release of its new 5-year reservoir levels analysis – the “stress test”, a methodology pioneered a decade ago by an Upper Colorado River Basin technical team that included John Carron of Hydros and Eric Kuhn and Dave Kanzer of the Colorado River …
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Getting ready for class class discussion this afternoon about “drought” (“I get to see my students in person!” he exclaimed nervously.), I had occasion to check the latest Climate Prediction Center long lead forecast. It’s a few weeks old, but I don’t expect it’ll have changed much. The brownest blob captures both river basins I …
I had the joy of sharing a goofy group text thread yesterday evening with a couple of friends exchanging pictures of the round rocks we each collected yesterday morning on a field trip to see the plumbing of the San Juan-Chama Project, which diverts Colorado River Basin water beneath the continental divide to bring drinking …
This morning’s operations missive from the federal-state-local Middle Rio Grande operations group (by “Middle” here we mean central New Mexico) notes a release of ~100 cubic feet per second of imported San Juan-Chama Project water for environmental flows, an effort to help the struggling Rio Grande silvery minnow. SJC water is removed from the Colorado …
I’ve been thrashing about this year thinking about ways of visualizing and measuring how dry this year has been on my home river, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque. Above is my latest stab at it. A flow of 100 cubic feet per second at the USGS gage at Albuquerque’s Route 66 bridge in the middle …
Colorado State University’s Brad Udall has been doing some really interesting thinking about how to conceptualize and communicate climate change risk to water supplies in the Colorado River Basin. Shown above (and shared with permission) is one of Brad’s “selected averages” graphs. The horizontal lines show the average river flow value for a period of …
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