Sorry, that was a clickbait headline. Let me walk it back: Odds shifted slightly toward a wetter Southwest monsoon this summer! The usual forecast explainer: this shifts the odds from the climatological one-in-three-years-is-wet statistical binning to a 33-40 percent chance of wet in the light green area, upwards of 40 percent in the dark …
More than a million acre feet of water disappeared from Lake Powell in the latest U.S. Bureau of Reclamation operational forecast for the 2015 water year, translating to a 13 foot drop in the big Colorado River reservoir’s projected end-of-September elevation in this month’s forecast compared to just a month ago. The change in this …
Continue reading ‘Lake Powell takes a big hit in latest Bureau forecast’ »
Vanessa Barchfield: University of Arizona geoscientist Karl Flessa said Tuesday that the eight-week flooding helped to germinate and establish cottonwoods and willows that will live for up to 50 years, demonstrating that even a small amount of water can have long-lasting effects on an ecosystem. But, Flessa said, the impact of the water varied. “In …
Continue reading ‘Karl Flessa on the Colorado River pulse flow, one year on’ »
This cemetery, on the “banks” of the All-American Canal overlooking Bard on the California-Arizona desert, has no grass: Immediately behind me as I stood to take this picture last week was the All-American Canal, an artificial river built in the 1930s to carry Colorado River water to the Imperial Valley. A lot of water. The …
update, June 24, 2015: Since this post was written in April 2015, a wet spring has reduced the chance of a “shortage” in 2016. It now appears 2017 is the earliest this could happen. The situation described in rest of the post, detailing what happens when a “shortage” is declared, remains the same. previously tl;dr …
Continue reading ‘1,075: What a Lake Mead “shortage” would mean in practice’ »
Checked in this evening on the snowpack map, which I haven’t been watching closely. Yow, what I missed! On the left is percent of average for March 1, on the right is this morning’s percent of average: Here’s what that looks like summed up across the Colorado River Basin above Lake Powell:
The Wellton-Mohawk Valley is one of those places where you can feel the desert pressing in around you, a ribbon of irrigated green no more than 3 miles wide along the Gila River in southwestern Arizona. The last of the winter vegetables are done, and farmers are getting the ground ready for their spring-summer cover …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert, Wellton-Mohawk edition’ »
This is a field fallowed under a 2013 agreement between Yuma Mesa Irrigation and Drainage District and the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District. The deal is small, but it raises all kinds of fascinating issues of both water management and culture down here in Arizona’s southwestern corner, where water is both economically critical and culturally …
Continue reading ‘Fallowed ground: 21st century water institutions on Yuma Mesa’ »
One of the things we do with Colorado River water is grow durum wheat in the Gila River Valley. Durum is used to make pasta. Here in the valley around Yuma, where the Gila River meets the Colorado in Arizona’s southwestern corner, durum is planted as a cover crop in spring on land that derives …
The Colorado River isn’t very big here, but there’s still enough water in it to drop a pump and irrigate a crop. This is on a weird little geographic island, a chunk of land that is on the west (California) side of the river, but legally in Arizona – left stranded when the Colorado River …
Continue reading ‘It’s not all Hoover Dam and giant canals’ »