A colleague notes an interesting bit of business in Dan Boyd’s story in this morning’s newspaper about the state of New Mexico’s “closing fund”, a state government goody bag to help fund economic development: The most recent project to be allocated closing fund dollars is the expansion of a Southwest Cheese Co. factory in Clovis. …
Continue reading ‘I should have written a book about pizza cheese’ »
Seen on my bike ride this morning, Albuquerque’s Tumbleweed Snowman in preparation in the back lot behind the flood control authority offices and workshop: Tumbleweed Snowman history Some years ago I got the help of retiring Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo Flood Control Authority engineer John Kelly to trace the history of the snowman, which by tradition …
Continue reading ‘A legend in the making: Albuquerque Tumbleweed Snowman 2015’ »
Brett Walton’s Circle of Blue update on the Interior Department’s upcoming Gila River diversion decision suggests we should expect a “yes” from Secretary Jewell tomorrow on a decision to proceed with a lot of inconclusive studies of the super-expensive project that will almost certainly never be built but that will be an intense environmental and …
Continue reading ‘Gila River diversion decision: “Reply hazy. Try again.”’ »
Amid the litany of the apocalypse, with the pictures of fallowed farm fields and dead fish and trees and cracked mud, here are five pieces of good news on western water, both on the supply side and on the demand side. 1. Colorado River Basin storage is up Total storage in the Colorado River …
Continue reading ‘Five pieces of good news for water in the western United States’ »
An excellent Laura Paskus story this weekend on a new climate water risk study by Justin Mankin at Lamont-Doherty and colleagues, includes some really important comments from Mankin on the implications of the work for water policy. The study helps clarify risks to water supply in the Rio Grande (and elsewhere, notably the Colorado River …
Continue reading ‘A plea for more attention to water use demand-side projections’ »
The New Mexico water nerd joke is that Elephant Butte Reservoir is where we spread our water out to dry. Everybody probably has the same joke? Built from 1911-1916, it’s one of the first federal reclamation projects, storing Rio Grande water for irrigation in southern New Mexico and Texas. It’s one of those reservoirs that …
Continue reading ‘The great emptiness of Elephant Butte Reservoir’ »
I just stumbled on a very cool tool from the folks at ESRI using U.S. government Landsat imagery (yay public goods! background here) allowing you to look at vegetation change over time. Here’s a graphic look at water use in Albuquerque 1990-2010. The bits in green are places where vegetation has increased. The bits in that …
Continue reading ‘Visualizing Albuquerque water conservation’ »
In 1960, the Cold War was a thing – the moral imperative of our global stand against the commies. At the time, Albuquerque, New Mexico, was one of the nation’s centers for nuclear weapons research, development, and management. What better reason for supporting water development? From a May 20, 1960 hearing before the House Subcommittee on Irrigation …
Laura Paskus takes us this morning to the mountains of northern New Mexico, where the snow is melting earlier than it used to, and less of the ensuing runoff is making it into our Rio Grande: [A]s bleak as southwestern springtime stream flow forecasts have been in recent years, scientists at the University of New …
Continue reading ‘Climate change, the Rio Grande forecast problem, and the death of stationarity’ »