Archive of entries posted by jfleck
New Mexico 2017 Water Year in Review
We’re up to 82 consecutive days without measurable precipitation at the Albuquerque airport, the 8th longest dry streak in more than a century of record keeping. And there’s nothing in the forecast out seven days, which is as far as it’s reliable to take it (butterfly effect and all). But OK, since you asked, the …
Merry Christmas
We will not be having a White Christmas this year in Albuquerque
The notion of a White Christmas is at best an inventive fiction, at worst a lie. Jody Rosen, in the wonderful book White Christmas: The Story of an American Song, put it thus: The longing for Christmas snowfall, now keenly felt everywhere from New Hampshire to New Guinea, seems to have originated with Berlin’s song. …
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What again is an acre foot?
Acting like the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan is Done
LAS VEGAS, NV – When I stopped at Boulder Harbor on Lake Mead Tuesday morning as I drove into Las Vegas, I saw this field of salt cedar taking hold on what had been a mud flat left by Mead’s declining water levels. It’s a clumsy metaphor for what happens when you get comfortable with …
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Lake Mead: 61 percent empty or 39 percent full?
LAS VEGAS, NV – “Dry for Decades,” the tourist placard at Hoover Dam’s Nevada spillway says. “The last time the waters of the Colorado River flowed through this spillway was in 1983.” On my way to this year’s annual meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association, I spent some time yesterday at Hoover Dam …
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More on the literary heritage of Santa Ana winds, and fire
Laura Bliss turned to Joan Didion today to help make sense of Santa Anas, and fires, in our beloved Southern California: For all the praise of its “perfect weather,” L.A. is often seen as a city created in defiance of the laws of nature. Before flooded Houston acquired a similar reputation, critics argued that parched, …
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Some thoughts on disaster journalism, fire, Southern California, and resilience
This conversation triggered by Faith Kearns’ comments about memories of Santa Anas got me thinking about an old piece I wrote a while back and never published. I didn’t publish it because the editor I was pitching didn’t want it, but in retrospect I’m glad it never ran. It seemed ill-timed then, and on a …
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“do not bombard people with evidence”
Students in next semester’s University of New Mexico Water Resources Program core curriculum will be reading this new paper by Paul Cairney and Richard Kwiatkowski: To communicate effectively in policymaking systems, actors need to understand how policymakers process evidence and the environment in which they operate. Therefore, we combine psychology and policy studies to produce a three-step strategy. First, do …