I recently (happily) stumbled across a web version of the full 1995 publication of the Colorado River “Severe Sustained Drought” study, a comprehensive “what if” exercise done in the 1980s and early 1990s. From the forward:: The Severe Sustained Drought Study contemplates a much more dire water supply scenario than that which has occurred in the …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: The “Severe Sustained Drought” study’ »
In late 2010 and early 2011, when I was plotting out the narrative arc for my Colorado River book, I began collecting what I imagined was the detailed storytelling material to describe the decline of the river’s great reservoirs. I’d been out to Lake Mead to document the day it dropped to record level. And …
Continue reading ‘River beat: the emptying of Lake Powell’ »
The agreement between the Southern Nevada Water Authority (Las Vegas) and the Arizona Water Banking Authority, under which Arizona banked water for Nevada, has always seemed to me like a harbinger of the future in the Colorado River Basin – mutually beneficial sharing across state borders. Via Juliet McKenna and Michele Robertson, it now appears …
Continue reading ‘landmark Arizona-Nevada water deal coming to an end’ »
From this morning’s newspaper, a deep dive into the issues surrounding the Navajo Nation’s struggle to secure water rights in northwestern New Mexico: It was 1948. Fred Wilson, New Mexico’s representative to the interstate group working to divide up the waters of the Upper Colorado River Basin, was pleading. “The state of New Mexico wants …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Navajo water rights’ »
The February forecast is for not very much water to flow down the Colorado River and its tributaries into Lake Powell: The dotted line is the median forecast. The solid line above it is the mean. The median forecast is for 54 percent of normal into Lake Powell. The dark blue bands mean that, even …
Continue reading ‘River beat: 54 percent of average runoff into Lake Powell’ »
Juliet McKenna is on a roll. You should really just skip me and add her to your RSS feed. Her latest entry is a look at the various ways of completing the sentence, “The Colorado River Basin Study is a call to action to….”? Check out her great list. Here’s the reason the diversity of …
Continue reading ‘What exactly does the Basin Study mean we need to do?’ »
Juliet McKenna has done a fantastic back-of-the-envelope calculation about potential effect of dust created by Las Vegas, Nevada’s proposed groundwater pumping system. Vegas, you’ll recall, wants to build a pipeline across the state, using groundwater from distant rural areas to fuel growth in that state’s largest metropolis. McKenna notes that various analyses of the project …
An interesting note from the Montgomery and Associates water blog on the financial problems facing the Central Arizona Project, which delivers Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson. If the Board leaves rates alone this year, some customers may be temporarily satisfied. However, financial problems will persist and grow, adding to uncertainty for the future. …
Based on the latest federal forecasts (pdf from USBR here), we can expect Lake Powell to drop 20 feet this year and Lake Mead to drop 10 feet. That’s the midpoint forecast. Could be better if it snows. Could be worse. So far the trend based on the first half of January leans toward worse. …
Continue reading ‘Draining the Colorado River’s reservoirs, 2013 edition’ »
The bonus water of 2010-11 on the Colorado River, when Lake Mead jumped nearly 50 feet in surface elevation, is looking more and more like an anomaly. The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center issued its January forecast this week, with early snowpack pointing to a mid-point forecast of 61 percent of average flow into Lake …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Another Bad Year on the Colorado’ »