The surface of Lake Mead is at 1094.30 feet above sea level, the lowest June 1 reading since 1937, when it was first being filled. All I can say is it could be worse. That’s six inches higher than the forecast in the most recent 24-Month Study, the planning document used by the U.S. Bureau …
Kudos to the University of San Diego’s Watchdog Institute for producing, and to the Imperial Valley Press for running, an excellent look at what’s at stake in the upcoming Imperial Irrigation District election. IID, the irrigation agency formed in 1911 to take over the interests of commercial water developers on the California side of the …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: “This makes ‘Chinatown’ look like high school.”’ »
The JAWRA blog had a post Friday on something that I’ve found maddeningly difficult to explain to newspaper readers: the cases where water conservation efforts don’t really save the water one intuitively thinks they do: Lining a canal, for example, may seem like “saving” water, but not if the leakage is replenishing a stressed aquifer. …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: When Saving Water is Not What It Seems’ »
When the Colorado River Compact was negotiated in 1922 to divide the river’s flow among the seven western U.S. states that span its basin, the representatives of the upper basin states were driven by the realization that they weren’t using much water at the time, but some day they would want to. Under western U.S. …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: The View From the Head of the Stream’ »
Reading the late 19th and early 20th century literature of the Colorado Desert, one could be forgiven for thinking there was a certain inevitability of the massive irrigation works that so changed the Salton Sink (renamed with characteristic enthusiasm as “Imperial Valley”.) It still seems inevitable. It was the time of manifest destiny, of “reclamation”. …
Continue reading ‘Not Everyone Thought Irrigating the Salton Sink was a good idea’ »
A couple of stories recently caught my eye, in which “drought” is blamed for what is largely an issue of water overconsumption. The first was a City News story on San Diego water supply. The reporter said this: California and the Colorado River basin have been in a years-long drought, which has forced reductions in …
NASA’s Landsat 7 captured this remarkable image of Lake Powell’s decline, as seen from space:
I guess the best you can say about the updated forecast for Colorado River flows for the rest of the 2010 water year is that it could have been worse. A wet April in the northern reaches of the Colorado River basin has pushed the Lake Powell inflow forecast, out today from the Kevin Werner …
Easy answer to the question asked in the title of this post, right? The last decade is the driest 10-year stretch since record keeping began on the Colorado River. Of course Lake Mead has dropped because of “drought”, right? No. During that entire time, thanks to upstream storage and the fact that Upper Basin consumption …
Update: Tom Pagano points out in the comments, I think correctly, that I’m incorrectly interpreting the data because the most recent data points cover a shorter period of time. So take this with a grain of salt…. ******* At the risk of overanalyzing a single short term data point, the weekly model runs from the …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Colorado River Forecasts Continue to Drop’ »