A guest post by Jack Schmidt of the Utah State University Future of the Colorado River Project. By Jack Schmidt The end of September marked the end of Water Year 2023 (WY2023). This is a good time to take stock of the year’s runoff and to understand how much reservoir storage improved. What kind of …
Continue reading ‘Water Year 2023 in Context: A Cautionary Tale’ »
Editor’s note: Today (Oct. 11, 2023) is the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Upper Colorado River Basin Compact. The following is an excerpt from Revisiting the Upper Colorado River Basin Compact on its Diamond Anniversary, a forthcoming analysis by Eric Kuhn and John Fleck, co-authors of the book Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring …
Continue reading ‘The Upper Colorado River Basin Compact at 75’ »
I’ve emerged from my cozy book writing cave (The new book’s going well, thanks for asking!) to some stunningly optimistic Lower Colorado River Basin water use data. Forecast use in 2023 (based on the Sept. 18 USBR forecast model) has dropped below 6 million acre feet, currently just 79 percent of the total baseline …
Continue reading ‘Deadpool Diaries: Lower Basin use on track to be lowest in nearly four decades’ »
I spent a couple of days last week out of Pagosa Springs in southern Colorado, touring forest restoration work in the headwaters of the San Juan-Chama Project, which produces critical water supplies for central New Mexico. In others words, water for my neighhbors and me. We’ve learned over and over in the last couple of …
Doing the usual just-in-time tweaking of the fall class (like my old artist friend from L.A. who made a living scraping and painting freighters while they shipped up and down the West Coast), I’m updating the course’s Colorado River module. I’d never actually pulled together a bibliography of my own stuff. Books, academic literature, significant …
Continue reading ‘A John Fleck Colorado River Discography’ »
Something remarkable is happening this year in the Lower Colorado River Basin that provides both a glimmer of hope about what durable basin solutions might look like, and also a clear demonstration of the obstacles still standing in their way. Nevada’s Colorado River water use is on track to be the lowest it’s been since …
When I first got serious many years ago about the project of writing (in the newspaper at the time) about New Mexico water, I went looking for the numbers. How much do we have? Who uses what? It’s a task that became central to my work. Eric Kuhn and I spent three years writing an …
Continue reading ‘On the shortcomings of the way we measure water “use”’ »
When last we visited, Lake Mead sat at elevation 1,054.28 feet above sea level. It’s now at 1,058.34, which is up ~13 feet from when I took the above photo last December. I hope they moved those chairs. The good news is the current forecast calling for the combined storage of Lake Mead and Lake …
Continue reading ‘Deadpool Diaries: mid-July Colorado River status report’ »
A guest post by Friend of Inkstain Jason Robison, the Carl M. Williams Professor of Law & Social Responsibility at the University of Wyoming College of Law and chair of the Colorado River Research Group By Jason Robison A few weeks ago, on June 22, the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) handed down its much-awaited decision …
Continue reading ‘Arizona v. Navajo Nation: What SCOTUS Didn’t Do Along the Colorado River’ »
Jack Schmidt, Charles Yackulic, and Eric Kuhn have published an invaluable new overview of how we got into this mess on the Colorado River, and some of the things we need to think about to get out of it. Schmidt, John C., Charles B. Yackulic, and Eric Kuhn. “The Colorado River water crisis: Its origin …
Continue reading ‘Schmidt et al: How we got here on the Colorado River Overview’ »