Preparing for a lecture for next week for the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program class I’m co-teaching, I’m having the students read this piece by my drought guru Kelly Redmond: Most concepts of drought involve a water balance. This implies that both supply and demand must be considered, as well as the question …
Continue reading ‘In California, clarifying what we mean by “drought”’ »
Lissa spotted this California desert treat this morning at Trader Joe’s in Albuquerque: It’s a cantaloupe from Fisher Ranch in Blythe, Calif., owned by Bart Fisher, vice president of the Palo Verde Irrigation District board and chairman of the Colorado River Board of California. I pronounce this a fine use of senior Colorado River water …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River produce in Albuquerque (courtesy Fisher Ranch)’ »
Tony Perry in the Los Angeles Times had a good story this weekend talking about the agreement between the Palo Verde Irrigation District and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California to move ag water to city use in the cities’ time of need: Next year the agreement between MWD and the Palo Verde Irrigation …
Continue reading ‘Palo Verde: what Colorado Basin water problem solving looks like’ »
Brett Walton: The value of the California drought, painful as it is, is that the state’s citizens are beginning to ask the sorts of questions that might previously have been confined to a conference room. Who gets water? How much? Who decides? What is valuable – economically, socially, ecologically – about rebuilding a wetland, or …
Continue reading ‘The hidden value of the California drought’ »
The Imperial County Agriculture 1965, one in a series of reports I’ve been reading on the history of ag production in the California desert, has an insanely cool picture on its cover that sent me down the NASA rabbit hole. It’s kind of grainy, a picture of Imperial from space labeled “Gemini V Official NASA …
Continue reading ‘Imperial, Coachella, and the Salton Sea, from Gemini V, August 1965’ »
How is it that residents of Southern California’s urbanized coastal plain (sort of) have voting rights in an irrigation district clear across the state? Pull up a chair…. At its Aug. 17 meeting, the Water Planning and Stewardship Committee of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California takes up this item: View note Let’s …
Continue reading ‘Water governance is weird, PVID-MWD democracy edition’ »
I’ve got a piece over at Water Deeply on Arizona’s latest latest self-destructive Colorado River Basin outburst and the clash between state-by-state domestic politics and the realities of management at the Colorado River Basin scale.
I would say “warm climate” is a fair description of the Imperial Valley in California’s southeastern corner. It’s 109 degrees there this afternoon (43C). Below is a great addition to my collection of adverts as the real estate boosters tried to lure folks to the desert during that oddly magical time when waves of immigrants …
Continue reading ‘Imperial Valley, circa 1903: “an unlimited amount of water”’ »
From the newly released archive of British Movietone newsreels, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes in October 1938 hits the button to open the gates on Imperial Dam, diverting the first Colorado River water into the All-American Canal and on its way to irrigate the farms of the Imperial Valley: The newsreel makes …
Continue reading ‘Imperial Valley, 1938: “a million parched acres awaiting for irrigation”’ »
Aquifer replenishment works. Sort of. And depending on what you mean by “works”. That’s the message in a new paper ($$$-walled) from Brian Thomas and Jay Famiglietti at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory looking at groundwater levels in California’s Coachella Valley. Coachella is the northwestern extension of the Salton trough, edging the Salton Sea and spreading …
Continue reading ‘Coachella groundwater management: it’s complicated’ »