One of my new tricks when looking at western water problems is to pose the question: “What is the failure mode?” It’s clear that on many scales, both temporal and geographic, we’ve got supply-demand imbalances. It’s easy to point that out and call the system unsustainable, to point out that we’re headed for a crash. …
From NASA’s Earth Observatory, Lake Powell at Hite this month compared to a year ago: h/t David Appell
Over at the Lane Center, a look at what the extra water on the Colorado River means: While Colorado Basin water users had survived 11 years of drought without suffering shortages, simply by draining their two big reservoirs, US Bureau of Reclamation calculations raised the clear possibility that by next year, the first ever shortage …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Bonus Water on the Colorado’ »
Because you can never have too many pretty pictures of the Colorado River:
When I was a young reporter covering Pasadena City Hall, I wrote a lot about the municipal budget, reasoning that budgets are where governments most explicitly establish and act on their priorities. But it was frustrating, because I just had one budget – no real points of comparison. So I set out one year to …
Continue reading ‘Why I’m optimistic about Colorado River water (California? not so much)’ »
Writing this week in the Los Angeles Times, the NRDC’s Doug Obegi makes the central point about the linkage between water problems across the west. Responding to Victor Davis Hanson’s argument in favor of giving farmers more water from the Sacramento Delta, Obegi makes the salient point that there isn’t the water to give: The …
Continue reading ‘The Colorado River and Sacramento Delta limits’ »
Paul Miller and Tom Piechota have assembled a new set of data suggesting a decline in precipitation in the West, and more particularly in the basin that feeds the Colorado River. For this work, they looked at SNOTEL stations, the network of snow measurement sites run by NRCS that feed data into streamflow forecasts. For …
Nearly every time I write a newspaper story about water, and without fail every time I give a talk, I get a question about why we don’t just build a big canal from some wet place and bring the water here to the desert southwest. It just seems so crazy to me – so over-the-top-engineering-costly-we-don’t-do-that-stuff-any-more …
Continue reading ‘Drought? But it’s flooding on the Mississippi!’ »
My new favorite Twitter feed is @jwesleypowell, who is tweeting his trip down the Colorado River into the great unknown: Soon after dinner, we discover the mouth of the San Juan, where we camp. The tweets are drawn from the publicly published version of John Wesley Powell’s journals, which is a ripping good read. But …
A reminder that Northern California’s water problems and the Colorado Basin’s are linked, in this new paper by Paul Miller and Thomas Piechota on snowpack around the West. Miller and Piechota focus primarily on Colorado Basin snowpack (which as we know is declining) but note the relevance of the Sierra Nevada as well: Decreasing snowpack …
Continue reading ‘Sierras and the Colorado Basin: We’re All In This Together’ »