By the numbers, Lake Mead began 2019 at elevation 1,081.47 feet above sea level, down a foot in 2018. This comes in spite of yet another Upper Basin release of 9 million acre feet from Glen Canyon Dam last year, an extra 770,000 acre feet above the 8.23 million acre feet the Lower Basin can …
Continue reading ‘Happy New Year, Lake Mead dropped another foot in 2018’ »
I turned down this alley in Albuquerque’s Old Town on a bike ride this morning, amazed that I’d never noticed it before. I spend a lot of time on the bike. I’m long past my youthful zoomy lifestyle, but in my slow and plodding way I have come to deeply value my time wandering Albuquerque. …
If I was still a newspaper reporter, I would have been begging for this story.
I’m forever needing to look up these numbers, sticking them here so I can find them easily, and y’all can as well. It’s the cuts by Lake Mead elevation levels for the various parties under the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan and the related Minute 323 between the U.S. and Mexico:
In the southwest…. “The last 19 years have been equivalent to the worst 19 years of the worst mega-droughts on record,” said Park Williams, a professor of bioclimatology at Columbia University, at a presentation of the work. Only three recent mega-droughts—in the late 800s, the mid-1100s, and the late 1500s—were worse than the current period, …
Conjure Water is a mage spell that provides the caster with mana-replenishing drinks. There is no limit to the amount of water a mage may conjure or carry. Fetch us some mages. (source)
LAS VEGAS – With Commissioner of Reclamation Brenda Burman’s ultimatum to the Colorado River Basin States at the just-completed Colorado River Water Users Association meeting in Las Vegas, it seems we’re going to get a Drought Contingency Plan, or something very much like it, in 2019. This could be very messy, but it suggests that …
Continue reading ‘Beyond the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan’ »
Mead, Elwood. (1903). Irrigation Institutions.
Looking for art for the new book, I ran across the above picture from the amazing Library of Congress collection of Carol Highsmith’s work. Hoover Dam as cultural icon is big and muscular, which is by design and also a function of the fact that it’s hard to get back and see the dam in …
New data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation shows that total 2017 water use in the basin – 14.07 million acre feet – was the lowest since 1984. The total here includes estimated consumptive use in the Upper Basin, Lower Basin, Mexico, plus reservoir evaporation and estimated evapotranspiration by native vegetation.