Here’s my obligatory picture of Lake Mead’s bathtub ring, as seen this afternoon from Hoover Dam: The surface elevation this afternoon was 1,088.97 feet above sea level, the lowest it’s been at this time of year since 1956. It has dropped 20 feet since this time a year ago, which is among the biggest one-year …
Continue reading ‘Bathtub Ring, and yet more thoughts on why Lake Mead is dropping’ »
PARKER STRIP – In 2005, according to the Bureau of Land Management, the 16 concessionaires leasing BLM land along this strip of the Colorado River reported more than 4 million “visitor days”, people like these motorboaters enjoying a warm (but not hot) late winter day on the river. That’s a mobile home and RV park …
Continue reading ‘“half-told stories about the value of water”’ »
BLYTHE, CALIF. – It’s not quite the way I remember it. I suppose it never is. I’m on a reporting trip. I had some meetings in Phoenix today, then made a freeway dash out to the Colorado River for a few days of journalism-by-wandering-around. I ended up this evening near sundown in Blythe, Calif., dumped …
While the current snowpack numbers look lousy for Colorado River Basin runoff, a glimmer of hope for a late-season uptick in the latest Climate Prediction Center seasonal outlook. Green means “odd tipped toward wet”: I prefer to ignore, then the cognitive dissonance caused by this:
The new paper by Ben Cook and colleagues clarifying our understanding the risk of megadrought in the southwestern United States has rightly gotten a lot of attention. Combining paleo records and modeling of a changing climate under rising greenhouse gas scenarios, Cook and his colleagues have created some scary reading: [F]uture drought risk will likely …
Continue reading ‘Megadrought paper: message received, now what do we do?’ »
January was bad for snowpack and therefore spring runoff in the Colorado and Rio Grande basins. February has been worse. But we don’t use water at the basin scale, we use it one irrigation district and city at the time. Here I will attempt to sum up the current snowpack and water supply situation and …
Continue reading ‘Bad January, worse February in Colorado, Rio Grande basins’ »
The Colorado Basin’s two primary reservoirs lost, on paper, a million acre feet of water because of January’s dry snowpack, according to the latest numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. That’s the difference between what we expected to end the current water year with based on the January forecast, versus what the forecast looks …
Continue reading ‘Lake Powell and the Colorado River Basin’s disappearing 2015 water’ »
Albuquerque meteorologist Brian Guyer, who seems to be as obsessed as I am with the early snowmelt, plotted up the latest flow in the Azotea Tunnel* this year, compared with the long term median: * Azotea delivers New Mexico’s San Juan-Chama Project water from a trio of streams in southern Colorado.
From yesterday’s New York Times: The problem with using ocean water to replenish the lake is that current agricultural runoff adds three million to four million tons of salt per year, Mr. Shintaku said. The same amount of ocean water would add about 10 times as much salt. As the water evaporates, the salt would …
Continue reading ‘Why pumping ocean water into the Salton Sea wouldn’t work’ »
Today’s high in Durango was 59F (15C), 18 degrees above the 1981-2010 average for Feb. 8. In the mountains to the east – the mountains that provide Albuquerque’s San Juan-Chama drinking water – the snow has already begun to melt. The snowpack there is lousy to begin with – 62 percent of normal for this …
Continue reading ‘Very early runoff for the San Juan-Chama project’ »