The June forecast on the Colorado River is almost an academic exercise at this point. What we’ve got is what we’ve got. But it’s nevertheless notable that the folks at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center only needed one color this month for their map:

What’s the Colorado River failure mode? By which I mean, with as much specificity as we can muster, when the water begins to run short, who will get less? I’m pushing this question because of a frustration with the doom scenarios generated by simply extrapolating the diverging supply and demand curves forward in time and invoking …

Continue reading ‘In Arizona, a Colorado River shortfall would hit ag first’ »

I know it is in the mission statement of all card-carrying western water journalists to harp on the gloomy prospects of shortage. But in the near term, the odds of a surplus on the Colorado River are greater than the chances of a shortage, according to new calculations by the US Bureau of Reclamation. Don’t …

Continue reading ‘On the Colorado, chance of surplus early, shortage down the road’ »

The US Bureau of Reclamation this afternoon released its latest pass at quantifying water demand in the Colorado River Basin. Recognizing that there’s no one answer for what the demand curves might look like in the future, the agency looked at a range of six scenarios, based on input from the seven basin states on …

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Wildman and Forde make my last post on this subject look smart, arguing that the supply-demand imbalance on the Colorado River will hit Arizona and Nevada first: We find that initial shortages will be borne only by the cities of Arizona and Nevada and farms in Arizona whereas the other Basin states have no incentive …

Continue reading ‘Another take on Colorado Basin failure mode concludes that Arizona and Nevada are the trouble spots’ »

In the work I’m doing now on the Colorado River Basin for my book, I’m trying to get beyond simply extrapolating supply and demand curves and then running around with my hair on fire. The hair-on-fire thing is easy to do, because the current supply and demand curves, as the Bureau of Reclamation frankly noted …

Continue reading ‘Las Vegas, look out: A bad year in the Colorado Basin hints at the system’s failure mode’ »

Usually rivers get bigger and bigger as you go farther downstream. But the Colorado just keeps getting smaller. That’s Will Stauffer-Norris in the Aspen Times talking about the trip he and Zak Podmore made down the Colorado River, from end to end. In this case, a dusty, had-to-walk kind of end. It’s a a great line …

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