Let’s revisit regulated deficit irrigation and the analysis Mike Cohen did last year of the problems and opportunities associated with forage crops in the Colorado River Basin, shall we? Golf and the Bellagio Fountain are easy targets. But if you’re not talking about alfalfa, you’re not being serious. Here’s Cohen et al.: Irrigated pasture and …
I love this bit of business from Charles Fishman’s visit to Angel Park, a Las Vegas golf course, in his book The Big Thirst: By the time a golfer steps up to the first tee, Angel Park has used 2,507 gallons of water to make that round of golf possible, 139 gallons of water for …
Grover’s talking here about raisins, but I think it generalizes.
Four years ago, I stood on Hoover Dam staring down at the receding water line as Lake Mead set what was, at the time, a record low: If you blow this picture up enough, you can probably see pixels of rock that have not been exposed since the 1930s. Or maybe not. The surface elevation …
Here’s The Nature Conservancy’s Brian Richter, in his new book Chasing Water, describing what the solution space for the Colorado River Basin’s water problems might look like: Even though urban water uses (for domestic, commercial, and industrial purposes) account for only a minor share of total water use in most water-stressed places, urban water …
Continue reading ‘Why it’s not about the Bellagio Fountain redux – a peek into the solution space’ »
I love this picture. E.C. LaRue was a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist who in 1916 assembled the first attempt at a rigorous scientific survey of the water resources of the Colorado River Basin. Water Supply Paper No. 395 will never be mistaken for great literature. LaRue was one of America’s early technocrats, intellectual ancestors of …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River history pic Sunday: If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ »
This is a picture of the downstream side of Morelos Dam, on the U.S. Mexico border west of Yuma, Ariz. I took it in March, when there was water flowing downstream, into Mexico. That is an unusual sight. This is usually the point where the Colorado River ends. It’s not entirely clear to me where …
tl;dr Vegas is an easy target, but Lake Mead’s problems involve far more than Sin City’s profligacy. Longer version: As Lake Mead drops toward a record low some time next month, there’s a temptation to draw a dotted line to the Bellagio Fountain, 30 miles to the west, and point a finger of blame. It’s …
If I was trying to manage water in California, these maps would give me the heebie-jeebies. It’s from a new paper (AGU-walled) by Zion Klos and colleagues extending our knowledge of the shift from snow to rain in the high country of the western United States as a result of warming temperatures. Here’s why this …
Continue reading ‘In the West, what used to be snow, falling as rain’ »
A century and a half ago, there was enough water in the Yuma stretch of the Colorado River to sink a steamboat: On this date in 1854, the first steamer on the Colorado River, The Uncle Sam, sank at Pilot Knob. Today, it’s pickups, stuck in the sand: Yuma Station agents patrolling near the Colorado …
Continue reading ‘Steamboats and pickup trucks in the Colorado River’ »