We’re having a moment right now on central New Mexico’s Rio Grande as we gird for a drying river through the Albuquerque reach for the first time since 1983. Expect drying to first start showing up below the Rio Bravo bridge sometime in July, between the bridge and the Albuquerque wastewater treatment plant, where the …
Continue reading ‘What’s next on New Mexico’s Rio Grande – bearing witness to a drying river’ »
Mary Harner and I spent a good deal of time this morning trying to get our bearings walking along the west bank of Albuquerque’s Rio Grande near a place we call “the oxbow”. Mary, a friend and colleague from the University of Nebraska at Kearney, has been working on a delightful river research project for …
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With flows in the Rio Grande dropping rapidly, Albuquerque will stop diverting drinking water from the river Friday, switching to its groundwater wells for municipal supply. This is the second year in a row that dry conditions have so depleted the river’s flow that the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority had to shut down …
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I got an email this morning from a friend watching as the bottom begins to drop out of the Rio Grande’s flow at a place called Otowi, north of Albuquerque. When Otowi drops, the river here in Albuquerque soon follows – one of those upstream/downstream things. It’s been a weird year on our river – …
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The 1928 report they call “Burkholder’s Bible” – more formally “A Plan For Flood Control, Drainage and Irrigation of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy Project” – must be treated as one of modern Albuquerque’s founding texts. Like any such text, it rewards careful reading. Also in the manner of such texts, the more you read …
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A guest post by David Rosenberg. David E. Rosenberg Utah State University | david.rosenberg@usu.edu | @WaterModeler The term buy-and-dry plays to the fears of farm and ranch communities. Wealthy urban water providers buy up water rights, dry out farms and ranches, encourage people to retire to Hawaii or other locales, and export the purchased water …
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A guest post from Tom McCann, retired Deputy General Manager of the Central Arizona Project and a longtime leader of Arizona’s Colorado River governance. (This grew out of a comment from Tom on the blog and a subsequent email exchange.) By Tom McCann As we struggle with a long term management plan for water use …
Preparing for climate change on the Colorado River is hard. But we will make it harder, and narrow the scope of our options for dealing with it, if we don’t incorporate realistic flow reduction scenarios in our planning efforts. That’s the thrust of an editorial Brad Udall and I have in this week’s issue of …
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The latest US Bureau of Reclamation “24-month study” – the monthly update to projected reservoir storage on the Colorado River – shows the bottom dropping out of Lake Powell inflows after a starkly dry April. With inflows down a million acre feet from the April version of the study, the Bureau is now projecting total …
Following what NRCS forecaster Angus Goodbody describes as “an exceptionally dry April”, our anticipated Rio Grande runoff into New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande valley (meaning the flow at the Otowi gauge) is down 100,000 acre feet from a month ago. That’s about 44 percent of the 30-year mean. Importantly, April was really our last chance …
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