Denver Water today joined state leaders in the Upper Colorado River Basin with a letter accusing the managers of the Central Arizona Project of manipulating water orders to get more water out of the Upper Basin’s reservoir at Lake Powell. The actions of the CAP’s managers “several compromise the trust and cooperation” needed to solve …
In water management, it’s normal to zero in on one’s local geography and not think about the larger system – especially when state lines carve up a watershed. Thus, faced with a terrible snowpack year on the Rio Grande, we’re having three largely separate conversations about agricultural water management on the U.S. part of the …
Upper Colorado River Basin state leaders, in a letter Friday (April 13, 2018), said the water management approach being taken by the managers of the Central Arizona Project “threaten the water supply for nearly 40 million people in the United States and Mexico, and threaten the interstate relationships and good will that must be maintained …
Experimenting with some data visualizations to try to help make sense of where this very dry year on the West’s rivers fits into historical context, I came up this morning with this: The spaghetti is daily flow for each year in the USGS historic record for the gauge at Embudo in northern New Mexico – …
Continue reading ‘One of the worst years in a century of records on New Mexico’s Rio Grande?’ »
This Central Arizona Project infographic has been a bit of a “WTF” moment in the Colorado River Basin management community: Kudos to whoever designed this. I’ve struggled to find ways to explain this. First posted to the Internet, then apparently taken down, it’s a solid explanation of the tricky way the Central Arizona Project has …
My University of New Mexico water colleagues and I are hosting a conference May 17: New Mexico Water: What Our Next Leaders Need to Know Following the 2018 gubernatorial election, New Mexico will have new leaders of its resource management agencies. This conference will consider NM water & environmental challenges with presentations by former senior …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico Water: What Our Next Leaders Need to Know’ »
A guest post by historian Sara A. Porterfield, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Colorado at Boulder As I was working on a draft of my dissertation’s introduction a couple months ago, I decided that I HAD to know what percentage of the Colorado River Basin lies in Mexico. This factoid would have taken up half of …
The headline on this terrific Robyn Dixon piece in the LA Times about how Cape Town staved of a water supply catastrophe has created an unfortunate framing: How Cape Town found water savings California never dreamed of One frequent interpretation as it rocketed around water-interested social media was, “We’re pathetic, look how much better Cape …
Continue reading ‘The Cape Town lesson: avoiding apocalypse’ »
With an 85 percent allocation of northern California water from California’s State Water Project last year, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California was able to cut back on its use of Colorado River water, leaving more than 300,000 acre feet in Lake Mead. That water has provided a sufficient buffer than Mead will end …
Continue reading ‘The Colorado River-Sacramento Delta Connection’ »
Sometimes I write stuff over at Better Burque.