More from in Brian Devine’s excellent series on the tradeoffs, some quite hidden, in the agricultural-to-urban water transfers that seem the inevitable path forward in the western United States: To many rural communities, water is more than just money. Irrigation is the lifeblood of rural communities’ economies, to be sure, but it is also a …
Continue reading ‘Ag-urban transfers: “a significant fission of costs and benefits”’ »
Ever since we saw early glimpses last spring of data from Stephanie Castle, Jay Famiglietti and colleagues about groundwater depletion in the Colorado River Basin, I’ve been puzzling over the policy implications. Their data, published today in GRL, is worth an “OMG IT’S WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT!” While we’ve been watching Lake Mead’s bathtub ring grow …
While we’ve been watching Lake Mead and Lake Powell drop during the last decade, the hidden reservoirs of groundwater beneath the Colorado River Basin have been dropping even faster, according to new research by Stephanie Castle and her colleagues at U.C. Irvine. Using gravity data from NASA’s GRACE satellite (the new tool all the cool …
Continue reading ‘New data shows Colorado Basin groundwater loss greater than reservoir shrinkage’ »
With a meeting coming up Friday of representatives of the seven Colorado River basin states, pressure is increasing to do something about the dropping reservoir levels in the basin, Tony Davis reports: “How urgent it is depends on what you think the risk is,” said attorney Wade Noble, who has represented Yuma-area irrigation districts for 30 …
Continue reading ‘Pressure increasing to do something about a dropping Lake Mead’ »
Ag-to-urban water transfers are one of the ways it’s easy to make the Colorado River Basin’s water math balance. Seventy percent of the water is currently consumed by agriculture. Just a fraction of that, transferred to use in cities (AMI, or “agriculture to municipal and industrial”), should make solving the problem relatively straightforward, right? Brian …
This line from a paper a few years back by Edella Schlager and Tanya Heikkila may seem obvious, but in the context of current discussions over the future of Colorado River management, it bears repeating: A water allocation rule that allocates more water than is available in a river is not well matched to its …
Continue reading ‘Eating the Colorado River shortage elephant, one bite at a time’ »
In December of 2002, an effort to sort out the problems of the Colorado River appeared as though it was about to blow up. California had long been living beyond its means (using more than the 4.4 million acre feet minimum guaranteed under the Law of the River). The deal would have given California time …
tl;dr The 1922 Colorado River Compact was supposed to sidestep the “doctrine of prior appropriation”, assuring slow-developing Upper Colorado River Basin states that their fast-growing downstream neighbors wouldn’t lock up all the water. But while that may be true on paper, 21st century reality suggest “prior appropriation” is back. longer: Bret Walton’s Circle of Blue …
Continue reading ‘Prior appropriation: alive and well at the Colorado River basin scale?’ »
At this point it’s just a parlor game, but has Lake Mead broken through the old “lowest since they filled it” record yet or not? Regardless of the fractions of an inch involved, it’s a big deal. (Go to Circle of Blue for an explanation.) But the conversation this week has been a bit confused …
Continue reading ‘So did Lake Mead break the record yet or not?’ »
For the latest “Ask me a Colorado River question,” a friend of Inkstain wonders: Q: Can you move water from one Colorado River Basin state to another? A: No. OK, this is the Law of the River, so of course it’s more complicated than that, with numerous edge case exceptions, but basically, no, you can’t …
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