One of the traditional “tragedy narratives” of western water is the idea that thirsty cities are draining our rivers. But in two of the last three years, precisely the opposite has happened here in Albuquerque. We’ve been limping along on a very bad year on the Rio Grande, with some of the lowest flows through …
I’m puzzling over the San Diego County Water Authority’s pursuit of a new Colorado River pipeline. I’ve been puzzling for a while, given a that it would be really expensive and that a really big pipe (aqueduct) already exists to carry the water to San Diego. My puzzlement was goosed by a report that surfaced …
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A friend last week pointed out something remarkable. Arizona, California, and Nevada are forecast this year to use just 6.8 million acre feet of their 7.5 million acre foot allocation of water from the main stem of the Colorado River. And that’s not just a one-off. Under “Tier Zero” of the Colorado River Basin Drought …
When there’s a lot of water in the Rio Grande, an extra 25 cubic feet per second is a “meh”. But right now, it matters a great deal. Figure 2 above is the output of a script I use to track river flows (code here for those inclined). You give it a USGS gauge number …
Continue reading ‘Visualizing Low Flows on New Mexico’s Rio Grande’ »
From the comments, but worth elevating to a post so folks it doesn’t get lost – Tom McCann on Arizona Sen. Martha McSally’s bill to restart the Yuma Desalting Plant: McSally’s bill is nothing more than a PR stunt–a way to appear to be doing something on the Colorado River without any risk of it …
Many thoughtful comments on yesterday’s breakfast musing on the implications of rising California ag land prices, here and over on the twitter, provide yet another reminder that my readers are far smarter than I am about this stuff. The most important point, which quite a few people made, is that a single California number hides …
New US Department of Agriculture report out this week shows the dollar value per acre of irrigated California cropland continuing to rise: Above is a quick plot of the data for six of the seven states included in the Colorado River Basin. THIS IS NOT COLORADO RIVER BASIN IRRIGATED ACREAGE. Large areas of many of …
Long story short, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque has dropped to its lowest levels for this time of year since the 1980s. The flow at the Central Avenue Bridge when I stopped to look on this morning’s bike ride was just 108 cubic feet per second. The last time it’s been that low at this …
It’s hard to know whether Arizona Republican Sen. Martha McSally’s “Water-Energy Technology Demonstration and Deployment Act” is a serious bill. Congress doesn’t do much of anything these days, so probably not. But, serious or not, it is a very bad idea masquerading as a good-sounding one. The good-sounding idea is the creation of a partnership …
Walking in our neighborhood these covid summer nights, a friend and I have been counting roadrunners. They are incongruous, relic dinosaurs as apex predators (but what of the hawks, and cats?) in our suburban neighborhood. Early in the pandemic, we’d see one or two. Rarely zero, but rarely more than one or two. We’d see …
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