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’ »
The science accumulates: The more greenhouse gases push up temperatures over the next few decades, the more New Mexico’s water supplies are at risk, according to new research by a team of Columbia University scientists. Using the latest high-resolution global climate simulations, the scientists show evaporation caused by warming temperatures is likely to leave less …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: climate change on the Colorado River’ »
Antoine Abou-Diwan had a story in the Imperial Valley Press (apologies if the link goes away, I think IVP sunsets their stories after a time) capturing the nervous twitches in California’s Imperial Valley over the future allocation of the Colorado River’s water. Through Friday (source in pdf), IID had diverted 2.9 million acre feet of water, …
Given the findings of the recent federal-state Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study, it’s useful to look back at what other efforts at sussing out the region’s water problems and solutions have found. It’s especially interesting given the (to me) striking assertion in the Basin Study that building a pipeline from the Missouri, or …
From this morning’s newspaper, a look at the coming trouble among farming, fish, cities and water in the Rio Grande: [W]ith farms and cities diverting water from the river to meet their needs, leaving enough for the fish and the ecosystem on which it depends while at the same time meeting human needs has become …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: trouble on the Rio Grande’ »