A few notes on New Mexico’s Rio Grande in 2022, as I collect my thoughts for a TV interview later today: Snowpack and runoff Snowpack peaked at ~80 percent of the median Runoff into NM’s middle valley looks to be less than 50 percent (maybe quite a bit less?) Dry spell As I write this …
Albuquerque’s nod to its agricultural past, like much of the style we have adopted for ourselves, is in significant measure artifice. This is not to say that it is not in some vague sense rooted in a truth, an actual past. But we engage in the 21st century in significant embellishment, a story we spin …
Continue reading ‘Tobacco farming and swamps in early 20th century Albuquerque’ »
Sometime last weekend (June 4-5, 2022), the Rio Grande south of Socorro, New Mexico, began drying. By this morning (Monday June 6) river managers reported 20+ miles of drying. The gage north of the 380 bridge at San Antonio dropped to zero today. The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, which normally gets the largest …
Continue reading ‘Central New Mexico’s Rio Grande is beginning to dry’ »
I love living in a town with a ditch bearing the name of co-workers. I love living in a town with a ditch that’s been continuously, tenuously irrigating this land since the 1700s. I love dodging traffic by turning down a “Dead End” street, knowing that only means cars, that bikes can pop out on …
At the eastern end of Sandia Road NW in Albuquerque is a ratty but important piece of Albuquerque’s water management history – City Well #2. Maintained now by the US Geological Survey, City #2 was installed in the late 1950s, a pivotal time in Albuquerque water management. The community’s population was booming. To meet the …
Ok, the logjam isn’t cleared yet, but we can see how the clearing will happen. Also, it’s not really Rio Grande storage, it’s the Rio Chama. But it’s a tributary to the Rio Grande. Headline writer’s prerogative. The deal is that El Vado Reservoir on the Chama, where central New Mexico stores its irrigation water, …
tl;dr – We’ve got a bunch of really interesting interdisciplinary work underway at the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program. If you know someone finishing their undergraduate work or early in their career, interested in water work beyond the solely sciency/engineering paths, send them our way! longer It’s weird, but now that I’m no …
The members of the Cattle and Horse Protective association of New Mexico, composed of men who are naturally deeply interested in a copious rainfall, believe that the Salton sea has given New Mexico a better climate. At any rate they want the matter investigated before Uncle Sam dykes up the Colorado river permanently. – Albuquerque …
Continue reading ‘When they thought the Salton Sea would bring New Mexico rain’ »
I woke up super early yesterday, couldn’t get back to sleep. To calm my spinning brain, I layered on some warm clothes and my dayglo construction worker safety vest, grabbed the bike lights off of their charger, and went for a ride. The moon was full, or close to it, sinking into the western sky …
Yes. But that’s not stopping me! The Jan. 1 forecasts, courtesy of Angus Goodbody of the NRCS, for flows at Otowi (the head of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley) and San Marcial (the tail) are for “normal” flows, where “normal” is defined now by the median of flows from 1991-2020. The reason it’s definitely …
Continue reading ‘Is it too early to be optimistic about this year’s Rio Grande flow?’ »