My life’s kind of a blur right now, but the official Island Press announcement of my book, along with the unveiling of its cover, is a thing that has just happened, so let me pause and catch my breath. People familiar with my frequent ranting about how Mark Twain never said the thing about whiskey …
Continue reading ‘“Water is for Fighting Over” – on the shelves in September’ »
No matter how big the reservoir, “if you’re taking more out than you put in, you’ve got a problem,” former U.S. Interior Department water and science chief Anne Castle said. Via Brandon Loomis
Tony Davis raises an important issue this morning about Colorado River Basin collaborative problem solving: But while most of the summit was filled with talk of new technologies and research tools, massive corporate investments in new supplies and hope for ramped-up conservation measures, an Arizonan who spoke at the four-hour summit offered a more discordant …
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’ »