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 …
To be clear: I think the Bureau of Reclamation’s announcement today that it is curtailing releases from Lake Powell in 2014 is a big deal. But one of the members of my brain trust (journalism is a mashup – I just repackage the ideas of people much smarter than myself) points out that there’s an …
Continue reading ‘The case for the Lake Powell announcement being no big deal’ »
Via the Albuquerque Journal: BOULDER – With the Colorado River Basin gripped by extreme drought, federal water managers Friday announced historic water conservation measures. Supplies in New Mexico, one of seven states that depend on the river’s water, will be untouched by the moves. But experts said the move is a warning that demand is …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Shortage on the Colorado’ »
The Bureau of Reclamation is going to tell us Friday that there’s not very much water in Lake Powell, and that as a result releases from Powell will be curtailed in the coming year, which sets off a cascading set of effects downstream. I took a crack at explaining this here, but Brett Walton has …
From Jay Lund, a comment on my post last week about low flows into that is worth elevating: Perhaps a bigger issue is that average unimpaired flow appears to be < 11 maf, but total allocations are more than 16 maf/year (1.5 maf/yr for Mexico and 7.5 maf each for the upper-basin and lower-basin states). …
Continue reading ‘Colorado Basin – the demand side problem’ »