A member of the Colorado River brain trust argues that when you use reservoir elevation to define an action level of some sort, the reservoir remarkably ends up hovering around that level. The updated annual USBR Lake Mead elevation chart, just published with the 2019 data, nicely illustrates their point. The 2007 Interim Guidelines set …
Continue reading ‘A rising Lake Mead? Or just hovering around a new elevation line’ »
Last year was, for Southern California water management, perfectly wet. By that I mean a good snowpack in the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado River Basin. I’m stealing a wonderful phrase here from a new paper by the University of Arizona’s Connie Woodhouse (the full paper’s behind a paywall): “A Long View of Southern California …
Continue reading ‘The risk of Southern California falling into “perfect drought”’ »
Laura Paskus asked a bunch of interesting questions about our new book Science Be Dammed and I did my best to try to answer them for New Mexico PBS’s In Focus/Our Land last Friday:
Happy to report that my friend Sharon Megdal, head of the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center and a member of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District Board, has been honored with the University Council on Water Resources Warren A. Hall Medal. Sharon’s a wonderful example (and role model for me as a new …
Despite an above-average snowpack in significant parts of the Colorado River Basin, the initial 2020 forecast is for below-average runoff thanks to a dry summer and fall. According to the Colorado River Basin Forecast Center’s Cody Moser, speaking in today’s first-of-2020 forecast briefings, the monsoon over the Colorado River Basin was the 9th driest and …
Continue reading ‘A dry summer and fall means less water in the Colorado River in the coming year’ »
The folks running Lake Mead’s marina – often a story line for folks like me writing about a declining western water supply as marina managers chase a shrinking reservoir’s shoreline – are running the opposite direction this year: In 2003, they had to relocate the marina to the south 12 miles because the water was …
With Lake Mead ending 2019 at elevation 1090.49 feet above sea level – up 9 feet for the year – it’s worth visiting the Bureau of Reclamation’s classic “structural deficit” slide and seeing how it compares to 2019’s real world data. First, a reminder of where the oft-quoted “1.2 million acre foot structural deficit” comes …
Continue reading ‘How big was Lake Mead’s “structural deficit” in 2019?’ »
While Colorado River water management eyes were focused elsewhere this year – on the big snowpack up north, or the chaos success of the Drought Contingency Plan – California has quietly achieved a remarkable milestone. Its use of Colorado River water in 2019 will be 3.858 million acre feet. The last time it was below …
Continue reading ‘California’s 2019 use of Colorado River water lowest since 1950’ »
The first bird I formally identified, as in “sat down with the book and then wrote down the result” was a great blue heron. The entry in the old family Peterson Field Guide to Western Birds, red ball point pen: 11/86 Sat on tiny island in Colorado River all morning, picking at its feathers The …
Public radio station KJZZ looks at Science Be Dammed, the new book by Eric Kuhn and John Fleck on the overallocation of the Colorado River.