Downtown Albuquerque at dawn
Downtown Albuquerque at dawn – gulping its first breaths, hunting a breakfast burrito and a cup of coffee – is one of my favorite Albuquerques.
Archive of posts filed under the New Mexico category.
Albuquerque has cut its per capita water use in half. We celebrated with cupcakes.
Update based on questions on Twitter and in the comments: This number represents all Albuquerque municipal water use – residential, commercial, parks, system losses, etc. Frequently per capita usage numbers quoted are for residential use only, so beware apples-oranges comparisons. Previously: There were cupcakes on a table by the door at the most recent meeting …
Institutions, shaping landscapes
Driving between old Mesilla, New Mexico, and the Rio Grande this evening after dinner, Lissa and I saw a bunch of new pecan orchards going in. We took last minute advantage of university spring break to head south. We spent some time wandering around looking at and thinking about the border, and also driving the …
“springs of living water would roll forth from these hills”
A story is told in one of the old accounts of the community of Bluewater, New Mexico, about a visit some time around the turn of the last century, by Apostle Brigham Young, Jr., to the Mormons trying to scratch out a farming life in this high desert valley west of Grants. The story involved …
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“What happens if we turn here?”
I turned down this alley in Albuquerque’s Old Town on a bike ride this morning, amazed that I’d never noticed it before. I spend a lot of time on the bike. I’m long past my youthful zoomy lifestyle, but in my slow and plodding way I have come to deeply value my time wandering Albuquerque. …
the ghosts of water “resources”
Driving in a pickup down a ditchbank on Albuquerque’s valley floor some years ago, Joey Trujillo pointed off to the west, to a line of trees snaking away into what is now a tony suburban neighborhood. It was the neighborhood we now call “Dietz Farm”, named after the Dietz family, affluent interlopers from the east …
Urban Trees and Water Use in Arid Climates: Insights from an Integrated Bioeconomic-Health Model, Jones and Fleck, 2018
Managing outdoor water use while maintaining urban tree cover is a key challenge for water managers in arid climates. Urban trees generate flows of ecosystem services in arid areas, but also require significant amounts of irrigation. In this paper, a bioeconomic-health model of trees and water use is developed to investigate management of an urban …
The draining of New Mexico’s reservoirs continues
Heron Reservoir, the first stop for central New Mexico’s imported Colorado River Basin water, dropped Oct. 10 to its lowest level since filling after it was first built in the 1970s: As I noted last month, total storage on New Mexico’s part of the Rio Grande system is at historic lows. I updated the numbers …
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Come help solve the Rio Grande’s problems: the NM Interstate Stream Commission is hiring
A great job here, helping solve problems on the Rio Grande: The incumbent will be responsible for independent technical and scientific engineering decisions based on the principles and methods of hydrologic/water resources analyses and evaluation. The position will required advanced technical analyses of complex hydrologic and water resource engineering issues; an in depth understanding of …
The drying of New Mexico’s Rio Grande
I went on a bike ride this morning to get a look at the Rio Grande through Albuquerque. Flows dropped below 100 cubic feet per second Thursday evening for just the second time since we moved here in 1990. Flows this low are hard to measure – we didn’t get a numerical picture of just …