It rained kind of a lot in the intermountain west this month, which raises a fascinating question about the tools we use for Colorado River management, and the tendency of water managers and management institutions to base significant actions on median flow forecasts rather than managing with a flexibility that considers the probabilistic nature of …
Continue reading ‘Reduced releases from Lake Powell: no going back’ »
The new header picture on the blog is from the USGS photo archive, attributed to E.C. LaRue, 1921, in Glen Canyon
Henry Brean on Pat Mulroy, arguably the most significant water manager in the Colorado River Basin: She got her bachelor’s degree from UNLV, then stayed on to earn her master’s in German literature. Laugh if you will, she said, but “it’s a great study in human nature, and it’s a great study in political theory.”
Here’s Henry Brean: Long-time Southern Nevada Water Authority chief Pat Mulroy is preparing to retire but won’t make a formal announcement until “she’s ready,” Clark County Commissioner Steve Sisolak said Monday. And Conor Shine: Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager Pat Mulroy is planning to retire after 22 years on the job. Reached Monday evening, …
Southern California, if I may quote myself, didn’t have enough water to support a city, “so they built three great rivers.” Not one or two. Three aqueducts to carry water to “the southland”, as we called it in my youth. The audacity of that act is captured in this map I stumbled across today, from …
Continue reading ‘The audacity of building rivers: Parker Dam and the Colorado River Aqueduct’ »
Antoine Abou-Diwan had an interesting story over the weekend in the Imperial Valley Press suggesting fallowing, rather than more sophisticated agricultural water conservation approaches, has become the default standard for water savings in the Imperial Valley needed to meet the Imperial Irrigation District’s obligations under California’s Quantification Settlement Agreement. Under the QSA, water saved in …
Continue reading ‘Fallowing – the path of least resistance?’ »
Lake Como, the Italian lake on which the real village of Bellagio sits, averages 42 inches of rain per year. The Las Vegas, NV, replica averages less than 5 inches. But they built a little lake thingie, and it’s got an awesome fountain:
A new paper by Darrin Ficklin and colleagues anticipates drying in the Upper Colorado River Basin, especially in its southern region: The shift from semi-arid to arid conditions is likely to be especially prominent for the southern and central subbasins of the UCRB. Climate Change Impacts on Streamflow and Subbasin-Scale Hydrology in the Upper Colorado …
Continue reading ‘Increasing aridity in the Colorado River Basin’ »
My name’s John, and I’m a water law junkie. I can’t get enough of Article III(d) of the Colorado River Compact. I love picking fights over the Upper Basin’s share of Mexico’s 1.5 million acre feet delivery obligation. I don’t care. I’ll argue either side. Just give me my fix. So I’ll happily stipulate that …
Continue reading ‘Brad Udall on the Colorado River and “the reality of the public”’ »
Chatting on the sidelines of last week’s Clyde Martz Summer Water Conference in Boulder, Doug Kenney had a great suggestion. We need something along the lines of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ famous nuclear doomsday clock for Colorado River water management. Doug’s comment came when I was grabbing some quotes for my newspaper story on the Bureau of …