From Brett Walton’s piece on a proposal to divert water from the Gila River in New Mexico (in the Lower Colorado River Basin), an old school argument for building western water infrastruccture: Gutierrez does not believe that the unit cost for water — what a city or a farmer will pay for an acre-foot — …
Continue reading ‘On the Gila River in New Mexico, a “field of dreams” argument’ »
With critics saying there’s no way New Mexico can get 14,000 acre feet of water from the Gila River, as promised in the Arizona Water Settlements Act, Avelino Maestas reports that state officials are talking about a second diversion, on the San Francisco: The Gila River may not be able to supply the 14,000 acre …
Since I left my job at the Albuquerque Journal, I’ve not been devoting the obsessive attention to local water that I did when I was, y’know, paid to. But a boy has to have a hobby, right? So this week I emailed David Morris at the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority requesting a copy …
Continue reading ‘Albuquerque’s water use continues to decline’ »
March – July snowmelt runoff on central New Mexico’s Rio Grande, which provides the bulk of the river’s water, is forecast to be 44 percent of the 1981-2010 average, according to a federal forecast out this morning. The measurement point for that number is the Otowi Bridge, which is on the road from Santa Fe to …
Continue reading ‘Rio Grande runoff forecast: 44 percent at Otowi’ »
Brett Walton’s annual U.S. municipal water rates survey is out. They show that, as post-World War II infrastructure nears the end of its useful lifespan, the cost of keeping things together is rising: Continuing a trend that reflects the disrepair and shows no sign of slowing, the price of residential water service in 30 major …
Continue reading ‘Santa Fe NM’s water rates are really high’ »
Despite some hilariously complex argument over the accounting details, there finally is enough water in Elephant Butte Reservoir on the Rio Grande that everybody agrees it’s now legal for the middle Rio Grande’s farm water agency to store some water behind upstream dams to help stretch out this summer’s irrigation season. The runoff forecast is still …
Continue reading ‘A glimmer of good water supply news for New Mexico’s middle Rio Grande farmers’ »
Seventeen of the last 20 years have had below-average runoff at Otowi (north-central New Mexico) on the Rio Grande: That’s from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s 2015 Annual Operating Plan presentation, done in Albuquerque last week. “Average” is the 1895-2014 mean.
Michael Wines in Monday’s New York Times: The perils of drought are on ample display along the Rio Grande, where a rising thirst has tested farmers, fueled environmental battles over vanishing fish and pushed a water-rights dispute between Texas and New Mexico to the Supreme Court. But you can also see glimmers of hope. Albuquerque, …
Continue reading ‘On the Rio Grande drought, not exactly optimism, but not pessimism either’ »
update: The preliminary human-in-the-loop forecast is substantially better than the automated one, at 55 percent. But still terrible. previously: The preliminary Rio Grande forecast for April 1 is just 33 percent of the 1981-2000 average, a dramatic reduction since the March 1 forecast that shows just how abysmally warm and dry the month of March …
Continue reading ‘Preliminary Rio Grande runoff: 55 percent through Central New Mexico’ »
According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, warm February weather meant the earliest runoff in the 40-plus year history of the San Juan-Chama Project, which brings water from southern Colorado to the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. But “early” does not translate to “a lot of water”. San Juan-Chama Project contractors, the largest of …
Continue reading ‘San Juan-Chama forecast: looks like a second year of shortfall’ »