By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck The Bureau of Reclamation’s January 2024 “Most Probable” 24-month study forecasts that annual releases from Glen Canyon Dam for both Water Years 2025 and 2026 will be 7.48 million acre-feet per year (maf). If this happens, the ten-year total flow at Lee Ferry for the 2017-2026 period will drop …
Continue reading ‘Are We Headed for the First Colorado River Compact Tripwire?’ »
By Jack Schmidt | January 9, 2024 There was not much loss in reservoir storage in the Colorado River basin in December 2023. Total storage in the basin’s reservoirs only declined by 17,000 acre feet during the month, and the combined contents of Lake Mead and Lake Powell increased by 68,000 acre feet. At year’s …
Peering out across the Colorado River landscape for 2024, a few things I’ve been reading to help catch y’all up: Paying to conserve Annie Snider had a terrific story in late November about the role of federal cash in the short term solutions to the Colorado River’s challenges that needs to echo outside the usual …
The news out of last week’s Colorado River Water Users Association is that, behind the scenes, a deal is taking shape with the potential to bring Colorado River Basin water use into balance with water supply. The deal would eliminate the “structural deficit”, and creates a framework for a compromise over the Upper Basin’s Lee …
An Inkstain guest post from Jack Schmidt, crossposted with encouragement from the Utah State University Center for Colorado River Studies By Jack Schmidt | December 7, 2023 In Summary By the end of November 2023, storage in the reservoirs of the Colorado River watershed had been reduced 1.73 million acre feet from the high of …
Continue reading ‘‘So Far, So Good’ for the Colorado River Watershed in 2023’ »
A guest post by Jack Schmidt of the Utah State University Future of the Colorado River Project. By Jack Schmidt A few weeks ago, I posted a perspective demonstrating that we consumed or lost to evaporation the “gains” of Water Year (WY)2011, WY2017, and WY2019 within two years of each of those large runoff events. …
Continue reading ‘Protecting Reservoir Storage Gains from Water Year 2023: How are we doing?’ »
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 …