This morning’s operations missive from the federal-state-local Middle Rio Grande operations group (by “Middle” here we mean central New Mexico) notes a release of ~100 cubic feet per second of imported San Juan-Chama Project water for environmental flows, an effort to help the struggling Rio Grande silvery minnow. SJC water is removed from the Colorado …
I’ve been thrashing about this year thinking about ways of visualizing and measuring how dry this year has been on my home river, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque. Above is my latest stab at it. A flow of 100 cubic feet per second at the USGS gage at Albuquerque’s Route 66 bridge in the middle …
Via Laura Gersony at Circle of Blue, a look at the work of Julia Bernal, leader of the Pueblo Action Alliance and a really interesting thinker on land and water here in the Southwest: She is an advocate of the Land Back movement, which calls on the U.S. government to allow Indigenous people to continue …
Continue reading ‘“We can’t have land back without water back.” – Julia Bernal’ »
Mary Harner and I tagged along yesterday morning out in the Rio Grande Oxbow with Wes Noe, a UNM Water Resources Program/Community and Regional Planning student who is doing his masters project at field sites there. Loyal readers will remember remember my travels with Mary, a University of Nebraska colleague studying the Rio Grande. Wes …
A robust July monsoon has allayed our worst fears about central New Mexico’s Rio Grande. Is it really a “monsoon”? Back in the days when my paid gig was writing newspaper stories, I loved writing about the monsoon, and every time I did I would get helpful feedback from readers anxious to explain that I …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico’s Rio Grande, bailed out by an impressive monsoon’ »
A most Albuquerque summer morning for a bike ride: Muggy monsoon dewpoint Muddy storm-fed Rio Grande The smell of green chiles roasting, early, in the El Super parking lot This lone green chile in the eastbound bike lane over the Rio Grande
Between the wildfire smoke and two important meetings for which I am unprepared, I intended to stick to a quick indoor Zwift bike ride this morning before getting on with my day. Until I checked the gauges. 57 cubic feet per second. It’s a morning ritual, the little iPhone app while I’m curled up in …
Holed up in a UNM Water Resources Program conference room, my book co-author Bob Berrens and I spent an afternoon last week trying to make sense of the graph above. The 1920 U.S. Census description of the greater Albuquerque area (Bernalillo County) captures a remarkable moment in our city’s history. We were a community of …
Continue reading ‘Bernalillo County Agriculture, a Very Brief History’ »
On a call this morning, Smart River Person made a really simple point that goes to the heart of my frustration about our current discussions about water shortfalls on the Rio Grande. The discourse involves blaming – mostly downstream people, in this case Elephant Butte Reservoir users, blaming upstream people for mismanaging the river. You …
Continue reading ‘“This is climate change stealing your water.”’ »
We’re having a moment right now on central New Mexico’s Rio Grande as we gird for a drying river through the Albuquerque reach for the first time since 1983. Expect drying to first start showing up below the Rio Bravo bridge sometime in July, between the bridge and the Albuquerque wastewater treatment plant, where the …
Continue reading ‘What’s next on New Mexico’s Rio Grande – bearing witness to a drying river’ »