The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s monthly report forecasting Colorado River Basin reservoir operations for the next 24 months (pdf) came out today, and it had some good news and some bad news for people in the Lower Colorado River Basin worried about dropping levels in Lake Mead. Mead ended February at a surface elevation of …
The folks at Montgomery & Associates are publishing a handy new summary of reservoir storage for Arizona, which I’m told will be updated monthly.
I’ve long dismissed the “pipeline to the Missouri River” (PTM? “canal from the Missouri”? CFM?) and other similar large-scale water importation schemes as vastly impractical distractions from serious water policy (see for example here and here). The argument, which I get regularly from well-meaning readers, points to the big network of oil and gas pipelines spidering across …
There’s a particularly important passage in Matt Jenkins’ new piece on former Las Vegas water manager Pat Mulroy’s leadership on Colorado Basin issues (behind paywall for now, subscribe!) where he describes an example of a convoluted deal to bank Nevada water in an Arizona aquifer: It was … the first federally sanctioned deal for a …
Continue reading ‘“intentionally created unused apportionment”: gobbledygook for the greater good’ »
I’m fascinated by the geomorphic traces left by the rise and fall of Lake Mead – human scale (egret scale?) shoreline terraces. This is on the northern bank above Boulder Harbor. The bird, shown for scale (I don’t have a rock hammer, it’s a great egret, so quite large), hangs out there because of the …
One of the members of my brain trust was speculating idly the other day about how different the Colorado River dialogue might be if the hydro-geo-chemistry of the bathtub ring was different – if the dropping water didn’t leave a white mark, letting you see how much Lake Mead has dropped, letting people like me …
The latest edition of Inkstain’s infrequent* Ask Me a Colorado River Question feature comes via Paolo Bacigalupi, and it wasn’t quite phrased as a question, but I’m hoping to resurrect the feature. I’ve always said “cap” for CAP and “snee-wah” for SNWA. But I have no idea why. Odd and embarrassing. @jfleck @waterwired @jonnypeace — Paolo …
Continue reading ‘AMACRQ: How do you pronounce “CAP” and “SNWA”?’ »
I took a lot of pictures on my recent trip. This is one of them.
With a dry February, the chances of a big snowpack and “bonus water” flow in 2015 that might begin to refill Lake Mead and Lake Powell are just about gone. April-July runoff into Lake Powell, the big reservoir in the Colorado River’s “Upper Basin”, is forecast to be 71 percent of average, according to the …
Continue reading ‘April-July Colorado River runoff: 71 percent’ »
It is testimony to a lousy January and most of February that the spectacular snowstorm I drove home into over the weekend left the key watersheds that provide water to the Rio Grande and Colorado River still behind average for the year. The 9 inches of snow at my house was the most since December …
Continue reading ‘West’s snowpack improves, still not great’ »