The artists helpfully made sure the caboose’s ID number was still visible. update: According to the twitter hivemind (thanks @kzodasnowman and @evanheisman!) the artists leave the numbers exposed (or in this case repaint them in big letters on top of the art) so the railroad people won’t come and paint over the art. Also, there’s …
Another of my attempts to visualize data from this remarkably bad water year in New Mexico. The cloud of gray lines is flow at the Gila gauge as the river leaves its headwaters mountains in southwestern New Mexico, one line for each year. The red line is this year – significantly lower than in any …
I stopped on the Gail Ryba Bridge over the Rio Grande this morning, the bike bridge adjacent to Interstate 40 that offers one of the great views of our river. The morning light was lovely, I saw a couple of egrets in the ditch down below. I love this place. Flows right now are stable …
Putting together a talk for our (UNM’s) big water conference tomorrow, I had occasion to fall completely in love with this Arthur Rothstein photo from his 1936 trip through New Mexico for the Farm Service Administration:
I went out to the Rio Grande yesterday morning to talk to KOB’s Eddie Garcia about the prospect of a drying Rio Grande through Albuquerque this summer. The final forecast numbers put this year’s runoff at just 18 percent of the long term average. The flow right now at Embudo, as the Rio Grande is …
Our UNM Water Resources Program students used the Gila River in New Mexico for their spring case study projects, so I’ve made it a habit to watch the USGS “Gila near Gila” gauge. Class is finished, but the habit is not. Flow there dropped below 30 cubic feet per second this evening. Update: I didn’t …
Continue reading ‘Historic low flows on New Mexico’s Gila River’ »
Julie Ann Grimm has a piece this week in the Santa Fe Reporter explaining Santa Fe’s approach to water management this year that’s a nice demonstration of why we don’t have incipient “Cape Town” situations (cities about to run out of water) in New Mexico: Groundwater wells that have mostly been resting on the city’s …
Not to be outdone by our neighbors in the Colorado River Basin to the west, here’s a letter from Texas Rio Grande Compact Commissioner Pat Gordon to New Mexico State Engineer Tom Blaine complaining that proposed water rights for a New Mexico copper mine would further cut into Texas’s share of the Rio Grande, a …
Continue reading ‘Meanwhile, Texas is newly mad at New Mexico over water stuff’ »
In water management, it’s normal to zero in on one’s local geography and not think about the larger system – especially when state lines carve up a watershed. Thus, faced with a terrible snowpack year on the Rio Grande, we’re having three largely separate conversations about agricultural water management on the U.S. part of the …