tl;dr Folks in the Upper Colorado River Basin are only using ~60 percent of their Colorado River Compact allocation Use has been basically flat since 1990. It is not going up. A couple of weeks ago I got an email, with an attached spreadsheet, from my co-author Eric Kuhn. It was his distillation of data …
The 1946 Bureau of Reclamation report projecting future development of the Colorado River – “A Natural Menace Becomes a National Resources” was its subtitle – included a picture of Hoover Dam with the caption: “World’s highest dam only partly harnesses the wild Colorado River.” The report laid out a staggeringly ambitious plan for the rest …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico’s shrinking Gila River diversion proposal shrinks some more’ »
If you want to dam rivers, as we were inclined across much of the 20th century, the location of the current Parker Dam on the Lower Colorado River makes sense – a narrow gap just downstream from the confluence of the Colorado and Bill Williams rivers on the Arizona-California border. I paid a visit last …
Continue reading ‘How Parker Dam might have been the Colorado River’s first’ »
With little water storage to speak of in the Imperial Valley, the flow of the All-American Canal west from Imperial Dam integrates, in close to real time, the collective decisions of a thousand farmers growing crops on half a million acres. A “hydrograph” is a commonly used tool for looking at the flow of water …
Continue reading ‘The hydrograph of the All-American Canal’ »
The unusually wet winter (with an assist from new Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan water reduction rules) has substantially reduced the near-term scare-the-crap-out-of-me risks on the Colorado River for the next few years, according to new Bureau of Reclamation modeling. Modeling done in January showed significant risk – a nearly one in three chance – …
They’ve posted my talk from the recent CU Boulder Getches-Wilkinson Center conference, in which I explain how we messed up the Colorado River Compact: Eric Kuhn and I are publishing a somewhat longer version this November.
Absent Colorado River water pulled from the river and spread across the valley floor, Palo Verde is a very dry place.
RED HILL BAY – I couldn’t resist the “abandoned boat ramp” trope when I visited the Salton Sea this week. No amount of channel dredging is going to get you to the Sea at this point. And all that recently exposed shoreline between the old boat ramp where I was standing when I took the …
YUMA – I brought a bicycle this week on a road trip to the Lower Colorado River, and left myself the morning today to ride out to Morelos Dam. After a quick morning of meetings yesterday in Tucson with the University of Arizona Press folks turning our words into a book, I drove on to …
Continue reading ‘The untimely death and life of the Colorado River’ »
The Bureau of Reclamation’s monthly storage model runs, based on the latest Colorado River Basin runoff forecasts, show Lake Powell ending the water year (Sept. 30) at 13.8 million acre feet. That’s an increase of more than a million feet over the May estimate, and 2.8 million acre feet above the Sept. 30, 2018 number: …