Thanks to Megan Kamerick and KUNM, our New Mexico public radio juggernaut, for offering the platform and leverage to help boost our message about climate change response on the Colorado River: [N]obody’s going to sort of voluntarily raise their hand and say, ‘Yeah, we’re happy to have less.’ And so negotiating those agreements where everybody …
By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck Unlike the Lower Colorado River Basin States, which have traditionally taken pragmatic and self-serving views of the 1922 Colorado River Compact, the Upper Basin States have largely shown the century-old document unwavering reverence. The reverence comes from the way the agreement protected Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico against …
Continue reading ‘Reverence or Pragmatism? The Upper Colorado River Basin’s Compact Dilemma’ »
A guest post from Tom McCann, retired Deputy General Manager of the Central Arizona Project and a longtime leader of Arizona’s Colorado River governance. (This grew out of a comment from Tom on the blog and a subsequent email exchange.) By Tom McCann As we struggle with a long term management plan for water use …
Preparing for climate change on the Colorado River is hard. But we will make it harder, and narrow the scope of our options for dealing with it, if we don’t incorporate realistic flow reduction scenarios in our planning efforts. That’s the thrust of an editorial Brad Udall and I have in this week’s issue of …
Continue reading ‘Taking climate change seriously on the Colorado River: a practical step’ »
The latest US Bureau of Reclamation “24-month study” – the monthly update to projected reservoir storage on the Colorado River – shows the bottom dropping out of Lake Powell inflows after a starkly dry April. With inflows down a million acre feet from the April version of the study, the Bureau is now projecting total …
It’s been more than a year since I’ve been able to update my Lake Mead bathtub ring pictures, but perhaps this graph, updated with the new Bureau of Reclamation projects into fall 2022, will help us visualize what we’re up against.
By Eric Kuhn The release of last week’s Bureau of Reclamation 24-month study felt like very bad news for the Colorado River (See Tony Davis for details.). But a careful reading of the numbers, and an understanding of the process through which they are developed, suggests things are likely even worse than the top-line numbers …
Continue reading ‘The April 2021 24-Month Study was a Shocker, but is it too Optimistic?’ »
From my conversation last week with Drew Kann at CNN: To Fleck, all of this signals that the reduced flows in recent years are likely not an aberration, but rather a glimpse of the challenges posed by a hotter, drier climate. “We’re now seeing the model for what the future of Colorado River Basin water …
I’m choosing my words carefully here. The “likely” in this blog’s post’s title means “based on my analysis of the Bureau of Reclamation’s current ‘most probable forecast’ Colorado River water supply model runs.” The Bureau’s current “most probable” modeling suggests that in both 2022 and 2023, the annual release from Lake Powell will only be …
Continue reading ‘Lake Mead likely to drop below elevation 1,040 by late 2023’ »
The AP’s Sophia Eppolito did a nice job of pulling a single bit of business from a lengthy interview that captured the key point of my thoughts on Utah’s approach to Colorado River governance and water management: The river supplies Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and Mexico as well as a $5 …
Continue reading ‘I said some things about Utah and the Colorado River’ »