In an email last week, Kevin Werner at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center called March 2012 “one of the warmest and driest on record in the Upper Colorado Basin.” The Forecast Center’s April 1 numbers are the ones you can start taking to the bank, with the bulk of the snow accumulation season behind …
What we call here the “water year” runs from October to the end of September. It’s a useful tool, capturing the fall-winter-early spring water collection season, in which snow builds up in the mountains for later use by humans and ecosystem, followed by the water use season. So the end of March is a nice …
Continue reading ‘Halfway through the water year: fear and the attention economy’ »
It’s easy to blame climate change when you’re in DC begging for money to subsidize your water problems. OK, maybe not easy, on account of DC not believing in climate change and stuff. Also not having any money even if it did. But the dynamic in this Steve Tetreault story as Pat Mulroy visits our …
Continue reading ‘You mean we have to pay for our own water?’ »
Is the age of big concrete – the dams to store western water and the canals and pipes to move it – really over? Are the projects now underway – perhaps the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s “third straw” into Lake Mead – the last we’ll ever see built? (I’m working on a piece that in part …
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?’ »