Update: I’ve added a post with a better seasonal precip map than the one below: ***** As we close in on the end of the current water year, the US Bureau of Reclamation has reported what passes for good news these days on the Colorado River. This month’s forecast for year-end storage levels in Lake …
To track my favorite topic, I have a Google news alert set on “Colorado River”. I’m trying to track water policy issues, but every year beginning in spring that news is accompanied by a macabre uptick in stories about people falling into the river, flipping their boats, going missing, and frequently drowning. Crews search for …
From the US Bureau of Reclamation’s photo archive, Hoover Dam seen from the upstream side, circa 1935:
From this morning’s newspaper (sub/ad req), a story about the new paper in today’s Science by Jonathan Overpeck and Brad Udall about climate change in the West. Udall and Overpeck have become fixtures on the western water meeting circuit over the last several years delivering this message, and the paper contains no real surprises. But …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Dry Times Ahead in the West’ »
I’ve written in the past about the remarkable fact that, despite the 10 driest years on record on the Colorado River, no one’s had their allocation reduced or cut off. The first plausible scenario under which that would change happens when the surface of Lake Mead drops to 1,075 feet above sea level. Under the …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Chances of Mead Hitting 1075’ »
The suddenly ubiquitous Bureau of Reclamation Colorado River supply-demand graph showed up today in a helpful Bruce Finley story in today’s Denver Post about the conversation in Colorado regarding the disconnect between shrinking Colorado River supply and growing Colorado River demand: Colorado River water consumed yearly for agriculture and by the 30 million Westerners who …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: The Conversation About Limits’ »
This observation from the first draft of next year’s U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Colorado River Annual Operating Plan should come as no surprise: Inflow to Lake Powell has been below average in nine of the past eleven years (2000-2010). Although slightly above average inflows occurred in 2005 and 2008, drought conditions in the Colorado River Basin persist. …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Up to Driest 11 years on the Colorado’ »
At the end of the beneficent water year of 1983, Lake Mead, the giant reservoir behind Hoover Dam that manages water for the benefit of Nevada, Arizona and California, held 25.7 million acre feet of water. At the end of water year 2010, according to the latest forecast, there will be less water than that …
David Zetland calls the cost of desalination the “backstop price” for water. Once the cost of other sources rises sufficiently, coastal residents will just build desal plants because it’s cheaper. While the fungibility is not complete (i.e. we don’t all live on coasts), water trades could allow people who live inland to play too. This …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Huntington Beach, CA, Poseidon Desal’ »
Given the remarkable role of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in western U.S. water history, it’s at least of symbolic importance that the church is among those who have filed protests against Las Vegas, Nevada’s proposal to build a pipeline to pump water from the Snake Valley to the growing gambling …