A new Stockholm Environmental Institute analysis of water supply and demand in the Southwestern United States suggests we’re screwed. In the U.S. Southwest – Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah – there is less rain and snowfall each year than the amount of water used in the region. Today that shortfall is made up …
Forecast flow on the Colorado River as a whole and major tributaries is down. I was otherwise occupied yesterday and missed the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’s monthly briefing, but Kevin Werner has posted his slides. Some high points: January, as you can see from the accompanying image, was remarkably dry across the basin, a …
The bemused Brits at the Economist paid Pat Mulroy a visit: The main reason why Lake Mead, currently only 40% full, has been getting emptier is a decade-long drought. Whether this is a cyclical and normal event, or an early sign of climate change, is unclear. But even if the drought ends, most scientists think …
Continue reading ‘Having to rip out your lawn is not the worst thing that can happen’ »
From this morning’s newspaper, a look at the implications of Santa Fe and Albuquerque shifting from groundwater to surface water imported from the Colorado River Basin (sub/ad req): For 40 years, San Juan-Chama water has been added to the Rio Grande. You could think of it as “bonus water,” and its loss should in theory …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Changing Ways New Mexico Manages its Water’ »
This is one of those headline cheats that my journalism friends heap merciless scorn upon, the question lead for which the answer is “no”. Sometimes thinking through the implications of the doctrine of prior appropriation pretzels my brain. The idea, in short, is that the people who were there first get to use the water, …
Lee’s Ferry is a storyteller’s delight, one of those connect-the-dots places that is simply irresistible. On the Colorado River just downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, it is where John D. Lee was sent into hiding (exile?) following the Mountain Meadows Massacre, where John Wesley Powell split his second Grand Canyon trip in two, where the …
Continue reading ‘“He called the place Lonely Dell, and it was not a misnomer”’ »
A couple of (possibly connected?) things that crossed my desk this morning – According to the latest data from the San Francisco Fed, Las Vegas (Nev.) has huge foreclosure numbers. And then this good news, from Henry Brean at the Las Vegas Review Journal: [W]ater use continues to decline in the valley, where the water authority …
Tom Yulsman and Brendon Bosworth have an excellent piece over at Climate Central looking at drought and water supply on my favorite river*. They capture what I think is one of the key elements in understanding what’s happening on the Colorado: the realization that, independent of the drought that has plagued the river for more …
With the mondo snow pack and good runoff forecast, Arizona may no longer need to leave some of its annual share of Colorado River water in Lake Mead, Shaun McKinnon reports: The CAP had been discussing a plan to forfeit as much as 80,000 acre-feet of its allocation this year to help keep water levels …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: AZ May Not Need to Leave Water in Mead’ »
What a difference a wet, wet month in the Colorado Basin makes. In December, the long range forecasts for the big reservoirs at Lake Powell (upstream) and Lake Mead were flirting with trouble. Lake Mead’s levels for the end of the 2010-11 water year were forecast to drop to 1076.68 feet above sea level, close …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: What a Difference a Month Makes’ »