The total combined storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell at the end of September (the close of the “water year”) will be the lowest since 1968, when Powell was first being filled, according to the latest U.S. Bureau of Reclamation “24-Month Study” (pdf). The current forecast calls for Lake Mead’s elevation to be 1,077.93 …
Continue reading ‘Mead, Powell to end year at lowest storage since 1968’ »
But man has in measure changed the desert conditions by storing the waste waters of the mountains and reclaiming the valleys by irrigation. His success has been phenomenal. Out of the wilderness there have sprung farms, houses, towns, cities with their wealth and luxury. But the cultivated conditions are maintained only at the price of …
Experimenting with plot.ly as a platform for posting graphs. Nothing here you haven’t already seen:
Sandra Postel has some interesting insights regarding the proposed Colorado River System Conservation Program: $11 million is a drop in the bucket of what is needed to achieve meaningful conservation savings in the Colorado River Basin. And each of the four cities has substantially more conservation they can do within their own borders. But what is …
Continue reading ‘Sandra Postel on new Colorado River initiative’ »
Imperial County in the desert of southeastern California is the nation’s leading producer of Brussels sprouts. According to the newly released U.S. Department of Agriculture Census of Agriculture, there were 2,237 acres of Brussels sprouts in Imperial in 2012, growing on 6 farms. For reasons unknown to me (c’mon, you’ve tried ’em, right?) Brussels sprouts are …
Continue reading ‘With Colorado River water, growing Brussels sprouts’ »
The University of Colorado’s Charles Wilkinson: One of the best developments for the environment in the West has been the quiet but deep revolution in federal water policy. Over the course of the past quarter century, we have moved from a dam-and-reservoir, build-at-any-cost mentality to a multifaceted approach that respects all that we need from, …
Continue reading ‘Wilkinson on the environmental shift in western water policy’ »
tl;dr – Heads up, Arizona. Less water headed your way! longer version – Stuck out here in the Rio Grande Basin, I’ve long suffered Colorado River Basin Envy Syndrome. The Colorado is the sexy river, which means it gets all the cool science. I dream of an analysis this rich of uncertainties in my river’s …
Continue reading ‘The Salt/Verde, climate change and Upper Basin Envy’ »
After stalling out for a couple of weeks, the Colorado River Delta Minute 319 pulse flow is back on the move. According to the latest map and missive from the science team, an earthen dam below the downstream-most habitat restoration site was removed, and the pulse has received an added stimulus from the Kilometer 27 …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River Pulse Flow On the Move Again’ »
When Daniel Trembley MacDougal of the New York Botanical Garden rode a flood pulse through the Colorado River Delta in 1905, he found a puzzling landscape – one of the most arid regions of North America sliced through by “swampy jungles”. At a time when beaver was being trapped into oblivion elsewhere, it was a …