The snowpack this morning in the Colorado River Basin above Lake Powell (source: CBRFC) measures at 90 percent of average for this date, which is a bit nerve wracking with the basin’s reservoirs only half full (source: USBR pdf). The latest forecast runs from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, the folks who run the …
Continue reading ‘Colorado Basin snowpack lagging, forecast for a wet spring’ »
California Gov. Jerry Brown has requested $80 in his new budget for dust mitigation and habitat restoration at the Salton Sea, Jesse Marx and Sammy Roth report: That’s less than the $150 million local officials wanted, but still far more than the state has ever allocated for restoration projects at the dying lake. The money …
Continue reading ‘More California state money for the Salton Sea’ »
All the cool kids seem to be buying up real estate in the Palo Verde Irrigation District. First it was the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which has upped its stake in the Colorado River farming valley to 22,000 acres. Now comes news that Almarai, a dairy company, bought 1,790 acres to grow food …
Continue reading ‘Note to self: invest my next $31.8 million in Palo Verde real estate’ »
Davis Dam has always been overshadowed by its Lower Colorado River siblings – the scale of Hoover Dam, the striking architecture of Parker Dam, the ability of Imperial Dam to move all that water to the farms to the south and west. Davis mostly generates power, and power generation has always been a bit of …
Continue reading ‘Turning on Davis Dam, 65 years ago tomorrow’ »
My California water friends are breathing a tiny bit easier, as an El Niño-fueled jet stream queues up a series of storms for the parched state. But the latest forecast models suggest the Colorado River Basin is going to have to wait its turn. The invaluable Daniel Swain wrote a couple of days ago about …
Continue reading ‘California wetting up, Colorado Basin will have to wait’ »
At the risk of repeating myself, Lake Mead ended 2015 with a surface elevation 1,080.91 feet above sea level, its lowest year end since it was filling in 1936. Happy New Year, y’all know what you need to do now.
If you care about Colorado River Basin water, it behooves you to pay attention to the snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada. It’s an entirely different watershed, but 2015 demonstrated how the interconnections in California’s plumbing have left the two inextricably linked. The tl;dr version of two interrelated points below: California’s drought has put pressure on the Colorado …
Continue reading ‘2015 puts Sierra Nevada-Colorado Basin linkage in stark relief’ »
Water is just water, right? What happened when Sierra Madre, a suburb northeast of Los Angeles, switched from local groundwater to imported Colorado River water is a reminder that, well, no: In 2013, Sierra Madre was forced to begin importing water from the Metropolitan Water District. That led to a new problem. The water source …
I’m not sure who came up with the “More Slices than Pie” title for the panel discussion I moderated Thursday at the annual meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association, but it had a nice ring. A big thanks to Tom McCann from the Central Arizona Project for putting the panel together and inviting …
Continue reading ‘“More Slices Than Pie: Structural Deficit on the Colorado”’ »
Anyone who flies in an airplane and doesn’t spend most of his time looking out the window wastes his money. – Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert My Southwest flight into Las Vegas was nearly empty (a rarity these days), so I had my choice of window seats on either side of the plane and the chance …