My thanks to a friend who recently pointed me, as we discussed the appropriate ways to account for Arizona’s use of tributary Colorado River water, to the above bit of history. In the official transcript of a 1946 congressional hearing, which was then gleefully repeated down through the years (you can see it on p. …
Continue reading ‘“in tribute to a million acre feet” – Herbert Hoover and Arizona’s Gila water’ »
One of the great lessons of the last two decades on the Colorado River is the futility of the “search for certainty”. No one number for “the flow of the Colorado River” can allow us to plan for the future. We face the formidable task of building a river new management framework that is robust …
Continue reading ‘Levels of uncertainty on the Colorado River’ »
Somewhere around Mile 22 of a long Sunday bike ride, my friend Scot motioned to a dirt road off to the left, crossing the railroad tracks. “We’re turning there,” he said. The ride down New Mexico state highway 314, through Albuquerque’s South Valley, across Isleta Pueblo and into Valencia County, is a lovely one, urban …
A dry January in the Rio Grande headwaters means a shrinking runoff forecast. Otowi (the Compact measurement point on which New Mexico’s Texas delivery obligation is based): 78 percent, which is down from 90 percent on January 1. Still big error bars, because the most important variable is how much snow we get in February …
Old John Fleck would have happily explained to you why this from Bruce Babbitt is a terrible idea: Damming the Gila River is a vampire proposal that would suck the life out of Southern New Mexico’s most treasured wild and scenic river. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham wants to kill the project. Both of New Mexico’s …
Continue reading ‘Taking New Mexico’s Gila water from the San Juan?’ »
Natalie Rogers did a nice writeup for the University of New Mexico on some work I’m doing with a group of University of New Mexico colleagues on climate change impacts and adaptation in New Mexico. Working as part of a new affiliation between UNM researchers and the USGS-funded South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center, some …
Continue reading ‘Some other stuff I’m up to – climate change impacts research’ »
Eric and I could not be more happy about this from John Berggren. There are countless Colorado River resources available to learn about the history of how the river has been and continues to be governed. Hundreds of books, reports, studies, and papers have been written on the subject. Accordingly, it takes something quite new …
Continue reading ‘Breaking through the Colorado River clutter: Science Be Dammed’ »
We’re diving into a semester studying (and modeling) Colorado River management in the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program. We’ve got a smart group of next-generation water managers, and we’ll be using the Goldsim modeling platform to build some system models. The students will be helping me think through the set of questions folks …
Continue reading ‘Some more Colorado River 2019 data updates’ »
One of the things I do with the students in my University of New Mexico Water Resources classes is try to develop the habit of paying attention, through repetition, to the available data on the systems we’re talking about. We use USGS river gauges to do this – checking the gauges is a classroom routine. …
Continue reading ‘Tracking the Colorado – flow at Lee’s Ferry’ »
A member of the Colorado River brain trust argues that when you use reservoir elevation to define an action level of some sort, the reservoir remarkably ends up hovering around that level. The updated annual USBR Lake Mead elevation chart, just published with the 2019 data, nicely illustrates their point. The 2007 Interim Guidelines set …
Continue reading ‘A rising Lake Mead? Or just hovering around a new elevation line’ »