My kindasortaweekly water news is out. Somehow drought shaming in California helped fill Lake Shasta, or something. You should click. Or subscribe for all the goodness delivered direct to your in box. This week’s includes a picture that’s prettier than I realized when I took it:
Add the South Platte in the state of Colorado to my list of watersheds outside of the Colorado River Basin that I need to pay attention to in order to understand what’s happening inside the Colorado River Basin. I’ve written here before about the linkage between the Sacramento-San Joaquin River system and the Colorado, because …
Continue reading ‘The South Platte-Colorado Basin linkage’ »
There’s no way to pin down the moment I started working on my book, because it happened in fits and starts that extend back in one form or another for more than a decade. But the first time I really went all in was in the spring of 2010, when I made a trip down …
Continue reading ‘Hitting “send” on my book’s manuscript, again’ »
In a neat new paper looking at sediment layers near Blythe, California, Jordan Bright of the University of California and colleagues (paper here, $ gated) argue that they’ve found evidence of the moment (in geological time, the “moment” is really hundreds of years) when the Colorado River made its first dash to the sea. The …
Continue reading ‘5 million years ago, when the Colorado River made its first dash to the sea’ »
This month’s US Bureau of Reclamation reservoir forecast model runs show the implications of the warm, dry spring, with a drop of 620,000 acre feet and six feet in elevation in the estimated end-of-year storage in Lake Powell, the major reservoir in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Here’s my long term forecast graph, updated with …
Continue reading ‘The warm, dry spring pushing Colorado River reservoir forecast levels down’ »
Connie Woodhouse at the University of Arizona and colleagues have a new paper presenting the most direct link yet between a greenhouse-warmed climate and reduced flows in the Colorado River. Modeling has for many years projected such an effect in the future, but the new Woodhouse et al. paper (Increasing influence of air temperature on …
Continue reading ‘New evidence that a warming climate is already reducing Colorado River flows’ »
WILLOW BEACH, ARIZ. – One of the things I miss about my newspaper life is the quiet pleasure of a cool dateline, dangling at the start of a story like a sparkle of anticipation. So grant me this one. Willow Beach is a boat landing and picnic spot at the bottom of Black Canyon on …
Sarah Tory at High Country News has a nice summary of one of those classic western water issues worth watching – the Lake Powell Pipeline proposal: The project would pump 86,000 acre-feet of water from Lake Powell 140 miles across the desert through a 69-inch buried pipe and then 2,000 feet up and over the …
Continue reading ‘Will Utah take more water from the Colorado River Basin?’ »
Via the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, here’s the February precipitation to date in the parts of the basin that make snow and therefore water: Beyond the dry, this map does a good job of how tenuously tiny an area produces the river’s water supply.
I was talking the other day about California’s struggle to solve its Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta problems with a friend who grows food with Colorado River water in California’s southeastern desert. The delta’s more than five hundred miles and three or four watersheds away as the crow flies from his farm. Why such a keen interest? …
Continue reading ‘The Sacramento Delta-Colorado River farming nexus’ »