People monitoring snowpack and planning for the coming water year use two quite different definitions for the “Upper Colorado” basin/headwaters/watershed. One definition involves the watershed above Glenwood Springs, within the state of Colorado, where the branch of the big river once known as the “Grand” and then renamed the “Colorado” begins. (Bob in the comments …
Continue reading ‘A word of caution about what “Upper Colorado” means’ »
While the current snowpack numbers look lousy for Colorado River Basin runoff, a glimmer of hope for a late-season uptick in the latest Climate Prediction Center seasonal outlook. Green means “odd tipped toward wet”: I prefer to ignore, then the cognitive dissonance caused by this:
The new paper by Ben Cook and colleagues clarifying our understanding the risk of megadrought in the southwestern United States has rightly gotten a lot of attention. Combining paleo records and modeling of a changing climate under rising greenhouse gas scenarios, Cook and his colleagues have created some scary reading: [F]uture drought risk will likely …
Continue reading ‘Megadrought paper: message received, now what do we do?’ »
January was bad for snowpack and therefore spring runoff in the Colorado and Rio Grande basins. February has been worse. But we don’t use water at the basin scale, we use it one irrigation district and city at the time. Here I will attempt to sum up the current snowpack and water supply situation and …
Continue reading ‘Bad January, worse February in Colorado, Rio Grande basins’ »
We have a mismatch between 20th century plumbing and a 21st century climate. USGS hydrologist Paul Milly and colleagues in 2008 threw down a marker in a Science paper arguing that human interventions (intentional and not) have rendered a basic premise of human water operations invalid. The premise is “stationarity”, the idea that with data …
Continue reading ‘Stationarity and snowmelt in the Pacific Northwest’ »
January was dry in the water-producing parts of the Colorado River Basin. The official Feb. 1 forecast for the Colorado River above Lake Powell (the part of the Basin where all the water comes from) calls for just 80 percent of median April-July inflow. That’s a big drop from the Jan. 1 forecast, which called …
Continue reading ‘A lousy January in the Colorado River Basin’ »
The new monthly U.S. drought outlook, out this morning, has good news for New Mexico: But wait, I thought that idiot Fleck told us in Sunday’s paper that water managers were bracing for another dry year in New Mexico. What gives? This: The question of who might be hurt and who will avoid the pain …
The University of Arizona’s Mike Crimmins: But the real answer might be for Arizonans and other people of the southwest to adapt to living under drought conditions. “We expect it to be a lot wetter than it is and it should be,” Crimmins said. “Just look around, the landscape tells the story. This is not …
John Van Dyke, in his epic visit to the deserts of western North America a century ago, wrote harshly of their springs: Occasionally one meets with a little stream where a fissure in the rock and a pressure from below forces up some of the water; but these springs are of very rare occurrence. And …
Continue reading ‘the dwindling of California’s “wretched little mud-holes”’ »
A couple of new papers exploring California’s drought triggered what I thought this morning was some overly simplistic back and forth on the twitters about whether climate change is to blame. I think that’s the wrong question. The first paper, which I wrote about last week, was the Griffin/Anchukaitis paleo look at the thing. They …
Continue reading ‘Tweeting lessons from a California drought’ »