“the nearest thing I have seen to being true”

A bunch of odds and ends cluttering my brain, blog posts that are half written in my mind that are in the way: Quoting Luis Villa on accessing the open data commons We’ve been talking about open data for a long time, but since using data is hard to consume and manipulate, open data has …

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The 1922 Colorado River Compact is Now the Obvious Elephant in the Negotiating Room

By Eric Kuhn, Anne Castle, John Fleck, Kathryn Sorensen, Jack Schmidt, and Katherine Tara As negotiators for the seven Colorado River Basin states rapidly approach Reclamation’s November deadline for providing a framework for a seven-state agreement for the Post-2026 Operating Guidelines for Lakes Powell and Mead, a larger threat looms. Reclamation’s recently released September 24-Month …

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A rainbow, a river, and the first cranes of fall

Autumnal equinox news briefs: I was on the phone in the front room of our house yesterday evening, facing east, as the setting sun dropped beneath the clouds after a short burst of rain. Rainbow. And the conversation, with the cousin of an old friend who died earlier this year, was rich. The Rio Grande …

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The Rio Puerco was running today

Deepening and widening of stream channels in the Southwest is a phenomenon that has taken place within the memory of men now living. It began at different dates from 1860 on and has progressed at different rates on several streams, as summarized in a recent paper.²? The flood plains of numerous minor streams are yet …

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Analysis of Colorado River Basin Storage Suggests Need For Immediate Action

By Jack Schmidt,1 Anne Castle,2 John Fleck,3 Eric Kuhn,4 Kathryn Sorensen,5 Katherine Tara,6 While Colorado River Basin attention is focused on negotiating post-2026 operating rules, a near term crisis is unfolding before our eyes. If no immediate action is taken to reduce water use, our already-thin buffer of storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead …

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Rio Abajo and the Unit 7 Drain

NEAR THE CONFLUENCE OF THE RIO PUERCO AND THE RIO GRANDE – The broad delta where the Rio Puerco meets the Rio Grande in central New Mexico has never been a great place to live, though people try. To the east, across the river, the Ancestral Puebloan Piro built the village Spanish colonizers named “Sevilleta” …

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New Mexico’s Dry Middle Rio Grande: More Data Visualizations

Alert Inkstain reader Rolf asked in the comments of last weekend’s post for a version of the above graph – number of days of low flow at the Central Avenue Bridge – with a threshold above zero. I usually set the threshold at 25, because our experience in the last two drying episodes – 2022 …

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