The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District Board this afternoon (Monday Oct. 14, 2024) approved an agreement among the District, the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, and the Bureau of Reclamation for temporary storage of District water in Abiquiu Reservoir on the Rio Chama while El Vado Reservoir is out of comission. This is a …
Continue reading ‘MRGCD Board Approves Abiquiu Storage Deal’ »
Tree Spring Trail FTW.
Update: Data here is from USDA, the “USGS” in the graphs is a typo in the code I used to generate them, which I’m too lazy to fix. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2024 estimate of alfalfa acreage in New Mexico, 130,000 acres, is the lowest it’s been since the 1950s. Acreage is down 55 …
Sept. 30 marks the end of the “water year,” an accounting milestone that gives us an opportunity to take stock. The change in total water storage year-over-year is one way to do this, to help understand if we took more water out of the reservoirs than the climate put in. The graph above is …
I left for my Sunday morning bike ride today as early as an alarm, coffee, and breakfast would allow – to beat the heat. To structure the route, I set myself a puzzle: to ride from Albuquerque’s Old Town, paralleling the Rio Grande to the north, all the way up the valley to the north …
Continue reading ‘Finding Albuquerque’s Northeast Passage’ »
I’ve been a) Playing with Datawrapper as a tool for displaying data here on Inkstain, and b) Thinking about Albuquerque’s aquifer as bad summer river flows force us back onto groundwater (City #2, in the North Valley, is one of a quartet of groundwater monitoring wells drilled in the late ’50s as Albuquerque’s population …
Our friends at the Abiquiu News (yay local journalism!) have an update on the sediment plug on the Rio Chama that’s been playing havoc with Rio Grande flows: The Rio Chama is officially on its way back into its original channel as of Tuesday evening. Workers from the US Department of the Interior Bureau of …
Talking to Jake Bittle for his Grist piece on the trials and tribulations of El Vado Dam, he asked me a question I loved: “What does this mean in the larger scheme of things?” My answer: We’ve optimized entire human and natural communities around the way this aging infrastructure allows us to manipulate the flow …
Continue reading ‘In New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande, the wheels are coming off’ »
Central New Mexico’s Rio Grande water users are perched on the edge of a dangerous precipice because of our failure to deliver enough water to Elephant Butte Reservoir, according to a June 28, 2024, letter from the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer to the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District. We’re currently 121,500 feet …
The graph uses day-long averages. The actual peak yesterday was over 3,000 cfs at the Central Avenue Bridge. Here’s what it looked like around noon: