udpate: full column here (sub/ad req) When I first began seriously trying to sort out New Mexico’s place in the scheme of Colorado River water management, I kept banging unsuccessfully up against what seemed like a simple question: If long term drought or permanent climate change reduces the river’s flow, how would the shortage be …
Continue reading ‘Climate Change on the Colorado: The Devil In the Details’ »
I was delighted by the National Science Teachers association recommendation of The Tree Rings’ Tale, especially this bit from science teacher Teri Cosentino: I was so inspired by the book that when a tree was felled on campus, we counted and measured the tree rings to see what happened during the tree’s life during the …
At the Dry Lake snotel station near Steamboat Springs in northern Colorado, there’s more than 4 feet of snow on the ground. By snow water content, that’s 32 percent above average for Jan. 7. Snow that melts there flows down into the Yampa River, which flows into the Green, which flows into the Colorado, which …
I’ve been watching Lake Mead rise remarkably as a result of last week’s storm that blew through Nevada before drenching the Virgin River watershed on the Arizona-Nevada-Utah border area. It looks like Mead will finish December at a surface elevation of about 1086.25 feet above sea level, 2 feet above the level forecast a month …
Shaun McKinnon reports this morning on a very interesting proposal under discussion in Arizona: Under a plan now being considered, water officials would pass up billions of gallons that they could take from the river in 2011, hoping to keep the drought-stricken reservoir full enough to avoid triggering automatic cutbacks. Any cutbacks could deny Arizona …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Conservation before shortage?’ »
An Ngram for western water nerds- “Hoover Dam” v “Boulder Dam”:
U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Mexican Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Juan Rafael Elvira Quesada signed an agreement today that, for the first time, allows long-term storage of Mexican Colorado River water in U.S. reservoirs. It’s an attempt to solve a short-term problem – the inability of Mexican users to take their full allotments …
If you’re a western water manager, the corners of your smile must be crinkled up in delight at the latest Quantitative Precipitation Forecast from the National Weather Service. That’s some mighty big bulls-eyes you see on the map over the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado River Basin. Going into this, the snow pack in the …
The roadblock to solving western water problems: [T]he understandable tendency of state, local, and federal interests to defer painful concessions in water resource allocation. Indecision persists as long as there is no absolute requirement that problems be solved. Paul L. Bloom, Law of the River: A Critique of an Extraordinary Legal System, in New Courses …
Continue reading ‘Western Water – the Persistent Roadblock’ »
Update: The papers are all on line here, and seem to be freely available. It stands as a cliché in western water circles to say that John Wesley Powell was right. But yeah, he pretty much was. “Powell’s conclusion in 1876,” John Sabo and his colleagues write this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy …