Eric Kuhn’s been calling this a “sneaky drought”: Another forecast predicting a dry warm spring for the Colorado River basin – The official CRBFC May runoff forecasts will be out next week. Look for a big drop in the A-J unregulated inflow to Lake Powell. https://t.co/5GkozLVHim — Richard Eric Kuhn (@R_EricKuhn) May 1, 2020 …
Continue reading ‘“sneaky drought” in the Colorado River Basin’ »
Between trying to figure out how to work with graduate students I can’t see in person, and starting nervously at our pantry counting cans of beans, it’s been hard to do any of the work that has sustained me these last many years. Thinking, and writing. As the fog settled in back in March, one …
Continue reading ‘Kuhn and Fleck talk about “Science Be Dammed”. May 6, in the cloud.’ »
The pipe that carries Albuquerque’s Colorado River water is not actually all that big!
Jenny Ross has a fascinating new paper suggesting we reconsider the story we all thought we knew about the formation of the Salton Sea: It is widely thought that the Salton Sea was created accidentally in 1905-07 because of engineering negligence in the diversion of Colorado River water for agricultural use in California’s Imperial Valley. …
April 20, 2010, I took a drive that changed my life. Around the back of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Yuma Area Office, helped by a map hand-drawn by Jennifer McCloskey, then the Yuma Area Office manager, I headed up a dirt road onto the levee that borders the eastern edge of the Colorado River …
Continue reading ‘Ten years ago today, a drive down a Yuma levee that changed my life’ »
From University of New Mexico Water Resources Program student Kirena Tsosie:
It’s been increasingly difficult to maintain a “social distance” at our neighborhood park, so the afternoon walks have begun to range. I guess, adapting my friend Maria Lane’s hashtag, we could call it #geographybyfoot. Headed north across the freeway last week, I found this in the flood control channel: It appears to be either an …
When I was writing Water is For Fighting Over five years ago, I built a little analytical model of Las Vegas water – projections of per capita demand and population growth, current patterns of water use and banking, risk to Colorado River water supply. At the time, the Southern Nevada Water Authority was aggressively pursuing …
Continue reading ‘Las Vegas abandons proposal to pump rural Nevada groundwater’ »
In the time of pandemic, I’ve been thinking a lot about small rural community water systems. This is in part because of work one of our University of New Mexico graduate students was doing in the Time Before, which seems super relevant now. Tucker Colvin just defended his thesis in UNM’s Geography and Environmental Studies …