Updating my “drought and climate change” lecture each fall is a useful exercise – this year more useful than most. Much like the year itself, my slide deck is setting all time records for new data visualizations needed to make sense of the remarkable 2026. Update Great questions from the comments. (I love my commenters.) …
Continue reading ‘Making sense of the crazy outlier year of 2026’ »
Of possible relevance to the current bosque dieback in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande? From PNAS: Predicting forest resilience requires knowing whether trees can physiologically acclimate to drought. Drawing on global in-situ field experiments, we find a pervasive lack of functional adjustment in forest trees. Trees maintain stable hydraulic and photosynthetic capacities, enabling maximum carbon …
Continue reading ‘The science of tree diebacks in drought’ »
The latest European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts got some ink/bits for their strong forecast for a wet winter in California (h/t Daniel Swain), but what do they say for us? Sorry for the blocky look, but when you drill down, the map gets pretty coarse – these are big pixels. But the headline is …
Continue reading ‘“Super” El Niño meh in the Rio Grande and Colorado River headwaters?’ »
I made a brief stop at a dry Rio Grande main channel this morning, around the Central Avenue Bridge, before I pointed the Space Ghost southwest into the South Valley. The Arenal Canal, which hugs the sand hills on the valley’s western edge, was flowing, but just 25 cubic feet per second. 100 cfs is …
Update: Apologies to Norm Gaume and the Water Advocates for screwing up the link to the original quoted piece, which is shared here via Creative Commons copyright [CC BY SA]. Original post: Terrific visualizations from the Water Advocates of the state of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande: Water Demands and the Effective Water Supply Stress …
2002 snowpack and runoff were terrible on the Rio Grande and San Juan. Think the San Juan Chama Project diverted about 6,000 acre-feet into the Rio Grande that year (normal would be between 80,0000 and 120,000 acre-feet. Heck, for Colorado on the mainstem Rio Grande, we had to negotiate a new delivery by Colorado to …
Continue reading ‘Quoting Rolf Schmidt-Petersen on water management in New Mexico in 2002’ »
I was crammed into the back seat of a Subaru wagon Friday, bouncing down the tail end of the last dirt road along New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande when the big marsh buggies emerged in the distance, blocking up the road’s end. In the lexicon of the river’s “maintainers,” we were somewhere around “River Mile …
I added the year to the title of this blog post for the search engines. Because what’s going on right now applies to a lot of years since I’ve been writing about this stuff at Inkstain. I’m gathering string today for the first Water Matters podcast of 2026 (available on Buzzsprout and wherever fine podcasts …
Continue reading ‘Expect another dry year (2026) on New Mexico’s Rio Grande’ »
Jack Schmidt on New Mexico water managers’ pushing 1,700 cfs down the Rio Grande in the middle of December to tidy up our annual Rio Grande Compact accounting: Thanks for the reminder of the tragedy of moving water at the wrong time of year when that water provides no ecological benefit. If that water were …
The Sunday bike ride included a brief detour to check out the river. The Rio Grande was flowing at 1,700 cfs, the highest sustained flows of the year, as water managers move water downstream to meet their annual Rio Grande Compact accounting goals. The “Happy Holidays” graffiti is, of course, there year ‘round. I love …
Continue reading ‘Happy Holidays From a Flowing Rio Grande’ »