Meet at the Bellagio fountains?
Any western water wonks in the audience headed to Vegas in April for the Implications of Lower Lake Levels Symposium? Leave a comment or email me, and maybe we can meet up at the Bellagio fountains and crack wise.
Archive of posts filed under the Colorado River category.
Concerns About New Colorado River Study
From today’s newspaper, my story (sub/ad req) about a Senate hearing earlier this week that touched on a study of water supply and demand now getting underway in the Colorado River Basin. The story’s brief, but the hearing raised what I think is a very interesting question: While individual states have looked at their own …
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On Moving Water and Spreading Risk
In theory, one of the benefits of interbasin water transfers is spreading risk. One basin may have drought while the other does not. But for folks on the Arkansas River in Colorado, that may not work out so well, based on new tree ring analysis by Jeff Lukas and colleagues. Chris Woodka of the Pueblo …
How Low Can Mead Go? Let’s Talk Come June
It’s looking increasingly likely that we’ll see history this summer, of the dry, unpleasant sort, on Lake Mead. With a meager snowpack in the Upper Green and Upper Colorado, the chances of a water surplus in the Upper Colorado River Basin that would allow an extra dollop of the wet stuff for Lake Mead have …
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The Insanity of Lettuce
In 1879, one John Codman published, as was the fancy of the day, the journals of his travels “Round Trip By Way of Panama through California, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Colorado.” His travels took him across the lower Colorado River desert, and he seems not to have liked it much: This is the great …
This is not a graph of the water level in Lake Mead
This is a graph of the declining construction employment in Nevada, not the declining water levels in Lake Mead. In fact, if we were statistically clever enough, we could no doubt find a negative correlation between the two. As construction booms, more houses are built, and our friends in Vegas consume more water. Construction up, …
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Low Bad
As Emily Green likes to point out, low is bad when it comes to flow and water storage on the Colorado, and it’s increasingly clear that low is what we’ll get this year: According to the forecast out today, flow into Lake Powell on the Upper Colorado, which is the key point on the western …
Green River Nukes and Water
The energy-water nexus is an issue all over the western United States. Many new sources of energy, from concentrating solar plants to oil shales, need water. New sources of water, whether pumping it long distances or desalinating brackish groundwater or ocean water, take energy. Few examples on the energy side are as interesting as the …
The Colorado River, Looking South, Circa 1889
It must have seemed like a good idea. Southwestern Colorado had coal. California needed it. And the Colorado River provided what seemed like a relatively level route to get from Point A to Point B. Thus was R.B. Stanton dispatched in 1889 to survey a route for the Denver, Colorado Canyon & Pacific Railroad. The …
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Chances of Extra Water for Mead Remain Low
The Bureau of Reclamation has tuned up its estimates of the chances of release of extra water to help Lake Mead, now putting them at one in four this year, according to an update published today (Wed. 2/10). The jargon here is “equalization,” which happens when there is enough extra water upstream in Lake Powell …
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