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 …
A month of warm, dry weather left Lakes Mead and Powell with 24.8 million acre feet of water at the end of November, 169,000 acre feet less than had been forecast a month earlier. The crux of the Colorado River Compact lies in Article III (d): The States of the Upper Division will not cause …
Continue reading ‘River Beat Weekly Report: What’s 169,000 Acre Feet Among Friends?’ »
Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. When I was visiting Hoover Dam in October, the folks who were showing me the stilling wells inside the dam took me on a side trip out onto the walkway outside the power plants …
Chris Brooks notes the good news: Lake Mead is finally beginning to climb. At this writing, its surface elevation is at 1082.30, after dropping below 1082 during the last week of November. And DG points us to some other good news. That’s snow pack as of Friday in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Those of …
To Emily Green’s monthly dirge to document as well as accompany the declining levels of Lake Mead, I would add this: Mead’s end-of-October surface elevation, 1081.94 feet above sea level, was 1.31 feet below the level forecast just a month ago. Recall that 1075 is the trigger level for the first lower basin shortage declaration, …