During our just-completed trip across the deserts of southern Arizona and southeastern California, the persistence of the snowbirds was one of the most striking features. I’d noticed them when I was down in Yuma in April 2010, but that was late in the season. Late February-early March is earlier, and they were everywhere. Canadian license …
Samuel Rhoads set out from Yuma to collect specimens from the Lower Colorado for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia on Feb. 4, 1905. Witmer Stone, who later catalogued and wrote about Rhoads’ collection, said this: The conditions that prevailed during the expedition were peculiarly unfavorable to collecting of any sort, the rain, cold and …
Over at the Lane Center, my latest on the progression of our Colorado River showpack: In December, I paid a visit to Boulder Harbor on the west shore of Lake Mead to see the results for myself. Boulder Harbor is one of those places where the dropping reservoir is made tangible. Two years ago, its …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: on the implications of a low snowpack on the Colorado’ »
Jennifer Pitt sounds an optimistic note about the possibility that the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Study could reclaim some priority for the retention of water in the rivers of the Colorado River Basin: The future of this region promises to be more crowded, and likely hotter and drier, but that doesn’t have to …
Continue reading ‘Bureau of Reclamation and water in the rivers’ »
Climate scientist Tamsin Edwards triggered a fascinating discussion when she chose the famous George Box quote – “all models are wrong, but some are useful” – as the name for her new blog. In a delightful exchange on Twitter (which I followed in real time and which Edwards quotes extensively in the blog post linked …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River models: wrong but useful’ »
As we await the release of the next release from the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study, a story by Chris Woodka nicely captures the tension as basin states try to influence the process by telling the Bureau what their long terms needs are: “I think the question is: ‘What is …
Continue reading ‘How much water is there in the Colorado, and who needs what?’ »
The coal-Central Arizona Project link always seemed a bit of a Rube Goldberg policy apparatus to me. Its Goldbergness seems about to unravel. Felicia Fonseca at the AP reports today on the potential costs of a retrofit to the Navajo Generating Station, up the hill from Glen Canyon Dam. The plant is part of a …
Continue reading ‘Arizona’s cost of moving water could be about to go up’ »
A couple of notes from Las Vegas, NV, the front line of the housing collapse, that have significant implications for the region’s long term water future: New home sales in 2011 were one tenth the number at the peak of the housing boom in 2005. The Las Vegas Review Journal quoted Pat Mulroy the other …
It’s all fun and games until you actually have to measure snow. The US Bureau of Reclamation’s first 2012 Colorado Basin reservoir forecast (the “24-month study”, pdf) projects a decline in total storage in lakes Mead and Powell, the Colorado River’s largest storage reservoirs, of 844,000 acre feet, or 2.76 percent. There are two ways …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: a forecast for decline on the Colorado again this year’ »
While archaeological metaphor can be instructive, I think we make more progress in understanding the fate of the Southwest under conditions of aridity and water scarcity by looking at what’s happening now, in the places that are really running short of water. What are people actually doing today? Which is why the Imperial Valley of …
Continue reading ‘Amid uncertainty, IID bumps up fallowing $’s’ »