In keeping with Twitter’s “Throwback Thursday” (#tbt) tradition, I offered up this picture today of Lake Mead, full. As near as we’ve been able to determine, this was taken in 1987. Here’s a picture I took in December from near the same spot:
In the years I’ve been working on Colorado River stuff, I’ve collected a lot of data. Most of this is stuff the river managers at the Bureau of Reclamation have generously shared with me. Some I’ve assembled myself by transcribing old paper/pdf records of historic documents. Some of the Bureau’s most important data is already …
@mwdh2o has moved to a six pump flow on the Colorado River Aqueduct to start the new year in case the Drought Contingency Plan not finalized. Can’t afford to leave 5-600,000 AF of ICS storage stuck in Lake Mead if we go into shortage. — Jeffrey Kightlinger (@8thGenCA) January 5, 2019 For background: Meanwhile the …
Continue reading ‘MWD increases its Lake Mead withdrawals’ »
By the numbers, Lake Mead began 2019 at elevation 1,081.47 feet above sea level, down a foot in 2018. This comes in spite of yet another Upper Basin release of 9 million acre feet from Glen Canyon Dam last year, an extra 770,000 acre feet above the 8.23 million acre feet the Lower Basin can …
Continue reading ‘Happy New Year, Lake Mead dropped another foot in 2018’ »
I’m forever needing to look up these numbers, sticking them here so I can find them easily, and y’all can as well. It’s the cuts by Lake Mead elevation levels for the various parties under the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan and the related Minute 323 between the U.S. and Mexico:
Conjure Water is a mage spell that provides the caster with mana-replenishing drinks. There is no limit to the amount of water a mage may conjure or carry. Fetch us some mages. (source)
LAS VEGAS – With Commissioner of Reclamation Brenda Burman’s ultimatum to the Colorado River Basin States at the just-completed Colorado River Water Users Association meeting in Las Vegas, it seems we’re going to get a Drought Contingency Plan, or something very much like it, in 2019. This could be very messy, but it suggests that …
Continue reading ‘Beyond the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan’ »
Mead, Elwood. (1903). Irrigation Institutions.
Looking for art for the new book, I ran across the above picture from the amazing Library of Congress collection of Carol Highsmith’s work. Hoover Dam as cultural icon is big and muscular, which is by design and also a function of the fact that it’s hard to get back and see the dam in …
New data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation shows that total 2017 water use in the basin – 14.07 million acre feet – was the lowest since 1984. The total here includes estimated consumptive use in the Upper Basin, Lower Basin, Mexico, plus reservoir evaporation and estimated evapotranspiration by native vegetation.