More art from the hard drive reorganization. This is the headwaters of the Little Colorado River from another Lissa-John road trip (we road trip well) through Arizona. It’s just outside Springerville, and yes, it’s green, and flowing. (The Little Colorado is more famous for brown, and its relative lack of flowing.) The development of the …
Since apparently all the cool kids love data, here’s some of mine. This is total storage in Lake Mead (blue), Lake Powell (reddish) and combined (orangey), updated with the 2011 end-of-year numbers as estimated by the USBR’s latest 24-month study (pdf). Note that if the numbers hold up, this will be the second time since …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Estimated Storage in Mead, Powell’ »
From the US Bureau of Reclamation’s April 24-month Colorado River operations plan (pdf): The April 24-Month Study with an annual release volume from Glen Canyon Dam of 8.23 maf projects a Lake Powell end of water year elevation of 3,662.63 feet. Based on this projected condition and consistent with the provision in Section 6.B.3 of the …
If you’re in Albuquerque, I invite you to come hear my latest thinking on the stuff I write about here – “Chasing Water: Climate Change, Drought and the Implications of the Disappearing Lake Mead.” April meeting of my friends at New Mexicans for Science and Reason, Wed., April 13, Rm 2402, UNM Law School.
Digging through some old files, I ran across this fascinating discussion of climate adaptation in a 2009 Las Vegas Sun interview with Pat Mulroy, head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority: [W]here we have finally begun to look at how to mitigate climate change and what we have to do in terms of changing our …
Also from this morning’s paper, a story documenting Albuquerque’s 60th consecutive day without measurable precipitation. We’ve got an outside chance of breaking the streak this evening, and then again mid-week. But the forecasts are basically bleak. But the real import was tucked in near the end of the story (sub/ad req): Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau …
Continue reading ‘Something Else I Wrote Elsewhere: Supplementing the River’ »
From today’s Deseret News, a sigh of relief for this year’s beneficent snowpack, which has has eliminated (for now) the possibility of a shortage declaration on the lower Colorado River: If Lake Mead drops a little further, it would force a declaration of a shortage and a potential cascade of orders to cut water use. …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: About that “Law of the River” thing…’ »
John McChesney, former NPR guy now at Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West, has jumped into the Law of the River discussion with a look at Doug Kenney’s work on rethinking the Law of the River: Kenney doesn’t believe the law of the river needs to be tossed out, but he says it …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Rethinking the Law of the River’ »
The US Bureau of Reclamation announced today that they’ve completed the pilot run of their Yuma Desalting Plant, cleaning up 30,000 acre feet of really crappy ag drain water. (“Crappy ag drain water” – my words, not theirs). From Joyce Lobeck in the Yuma Sun (and seldom was their a more appropriately named newspaper): Undertaken …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Yuma Plant Completes Pilot Run’ »