A new letter from Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Lewis to Arizona’s two top Colorado River negotiators complains that the latest version of the state’s plan to reduce its use of Lake Mead water would make things worse, in way that actual gives some Central Arizona farmers more water than they would get under …
tl;dr: A feud over how to implement Colorado River conservation adds another hurdle to final completion of the Colorado River Drought Conservation Plan. longer: While Colorado River Basin folks have been paying obsessive attention to Arizona’s struggle to come up with an internal agreement to cut back on its use of Colorado River, a second …
Heron Reservoir, the first stop for central New Mexico’s imported Colorado River Basin water, dropped Oct. 10 to its lowest level since filling after it was first built in the 1970s: As I noted last month, total storage on New Mexico’s part of the Rio Grande system is at historic lows. I updated the numbers …
Continue reading ‘The draining of New Mexico’s reservoirs continues’ »
It’s apparently Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan week! Documents here. This is when we all gather around and try to make sense of the sweeping effort to ratchet up efforts to reduce Colorado River water use to keep the system from crashing. The plan you see before you is really not that different, at the …
Continue reading ‘Creating a conservation storage pool in Lake Powell’ »
Mill Creek is a bit of a cipher as it slips through Walla Walla. Flowing out of the Blue Mountains, it is the southeast Washington town’s primary water supply, and its geographic organizing principle. But the “creek” itself, as it flows through the town built on its banks, is confined to a concrete channel, in …
A great job here, helping solve problems on the Rio Grande: The incumbent will be responsible for independent technical and scientific engineering decisions based on the principles and methods of hydrologic/water resources analyses and evaluation. The position will required advanced technical analyses of complex hydrologic and water resource engineering issues; an in depth understanding of …
I went on a bike ride this morning to get a look at the Rio Grande through Albuquerque. Flows dropped below 100 cubic feet per second Thursday evening for just the second time since we moved here in 1990. Flows this low are hard to measure – we didn’t get a numerical picture of just …
As Lake Powell drops, a waterfall forms at the reservoir’s upper end as the San Juan cuts down through sediments dropped when the reservoir was fuller. The resulting waterfall is a bit of an obstacle to fish: The razorback sucker population estimate for 2017 alone was 755 individuals and, relative to recent population estimates ranging …
Continue reading ‘Tough to be a fish in the Colorado River’ »
tl;dr Total reservoir storage on the Rio Grande in New Mexico at the end of August was the lowest it’s been since at least 1980. longer (with graphs!) In our University of New Mexico Water Resources Program class, we’ve been discussing the state of the Rio Grande in real time. This feels like a remarkable …
Continue reading ‘Draining the reservoirs on New Mexico’s Rio Grande’ »
From 2000 through the end of 2018 (projected), Lake Powell’s elevation will have dropped approximately 94 feet despite Upper Basin consumption only averaging about 4.5 million acre?feet (maf)/year. Several particularly dry years—including 2018—in a process of continuing aridification contributed to the drop, but ultimately it is the operational rules that are slowly but surely draining …