When I give talks about western water and the Colorado River they usually end, or sometimes start, at Morelos Dam. Built from 1948-50, it spans the river between Baja California Norte and Arizona, scooping up the last of the great river and diverting it west, to the farmlands of the Mexicali Valley. Visiting the Lower …
Continue reading ‘Morelos Dam, Minute 319 and replumbing the Colorado River Delta’ »
Ben Cook at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has a new paper that offers a reminder of why the impact of climate change on our ecosystems and water supplies involves more than “will it rain less”? In some sense this is an old and obvious point, which I link here just to repeat said …
Continue reading ‘Climate change in the West: it’s not just about more or less rain’ »
While Lake Mead’s drawdown might be viewed negatively from a perspective of maintaining full-pool water storage, it has re-exposed a vast area of new terrestrial habitat increasingly colonized by native species as invasive species abundance declines through time. That’s from “Plant colonization and soil properties on newly exposed shoreline during drawdown of Lake Mead, Mojave …
Continue reading ‘Here’s an upside to the decline of Lake Mead I never thought of’ »
tl;dr – It wasn’t the U.S. government “reserving” water rights on behalf of the Indians. It was the Indians keeping the rights they already had. Longer version: After I last took a stab at writing about the “practicably irrigable acreage” standard that sort of underpins U.S. Native American water rights in the west, a member of …
Continue reading ‘The origins of the “practicably irrigable acreage” standard, part II’ »
In 2001, the Arizona Supreme Court at least had the wisdom to acknowledge that Mark Twain might never have said the thing about whiskey and water and drinkin’ and fightin’. But the court used it anyway: We wish it were possible to dispose of this matter by establishing a bright line standard, easily applied, in …
Continue reading ‘Twain Whiskey-Water Quote Watch, Arizona Supreme Court edition’ »
tl;dr While Northern California flounders, Southern California’s drought planning kicks in as Met taps into its Lake Mead water savings bank Brett Walton, writing about President Obama’s visit to California’s drought-stricken Central Valley, captured that state’s water policy dilemma: “It can’t just be a matter of there’s going to be less and less water so …
Nevada journalist George Knapp has a wacky suggestion for Pat Mulroy on her way out the door at the Southern Nevada Water Authority: [I]t is still possible for Mulroy to make a grand, parting gesture by starting the ball rolling on a plan to drain Lake Powell…. This’d make an excellent final chapter for my …
Continue reading ‘Pat Mulroy, the Hayduke of the 21st century’ »
While much of the attention on the “ridiculously resilient ridge” has, rightly, focused on its effect on California’s drought, out here in the intermountain west we’ve been suffering too. Albuquerque is on the brink of its longest precip-free winter stretch on record (these records go back to 1920). And for the Colorado Basin? What had …
Continue reading ‘Drought, the “ridge” and the Colorado Basin’ »
I’m on the hunt for the origins of the phrase “practicably irrigable”. If anyone has any insights, please jump in on the comments. Here’s what I know: The concept is central to water law in the western United States. The first reference I’m able to find in the U.S. legal canon is in the 1960 …
California’s remarkable, looming drought conditions are a test, and via OtPR we’re seeing some clues as to who will pass: Southern California prepared for this and has a sufficient buffer that it doesn’t need to ration this year. And how did Southern California prepare? In part by being audacious enough and rich enough, but also …