Would I be right to guess that this is the first time tree rings have been in the Rolling Stone? “It was like looking through a telescope into the future to see how forests would respond, and it felt awful,” Williams says. “The result was totally unimaginable: wildfires, bark beetles, a huge reduction in forest …
There is a natural desire in water-short communities to capture and use stormwater. But a brewing feud between the state of New Mexico and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is a reminder that tweaking the stormwater management system is not without consequences, because the water you’re capturing would otherwise be going somewhere and doing something. …
Continue reading ‘A reminder that stormwater isn’t free water’ »
The New Mexico legislature is considering a bill this year that would make it easier for farmers to maintain their “agricultural” designation, for property tax purposes, during drought. This is important for preservation of rural agricultural ways of life, because ag land taxes are cheaper than land otherwise labeled (“residential”, for example). For this reason, …
The Albuquerque fairgrounds flea market is the place for hats.
Article VII of the Rio Grande Compact is one of the keys to allocating the river’s supply among Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas: Neither Colorado nor New Mexico shall increase the amount of water in storage in reservoirs constructed after 1929 whenever there is less than 400,000 acre feet of usable water in project storage…. …
My friends at the Middle Rio Grande Water Assembly are gathering Sat., March 21, to discuss strategies for managing water in the face of climate change in the central New Mexico reach of the river: While there is a Regional Water Plan for the three county-area (Sandoval, Bernalillo and Valencia), it is ten years old. …
Continue reading ‘Strategies for Middle Rio Grande water, March 21’ »
update, Thursday, 3/5: Final March 1 forecast numbers are in, unchanged for those in the preliminary quoted below. previously: It says something about the drought on New Mexico’s Rio Grande in recent years that a forecast of 67 percent of average runoff into Elephant Butte Reservoir is good news. That’s the mid-point of the preliminary …
Continue reading ‘Rio Grande forecast improves, but that’s not saying much’ »
Let’s talk about “polycentric governance” and the problem of regional water institutions, shall we? Because here in New Mexico, we seem to have this a bit messed up, and my book research is leading me into some compare-and-contrast exercises that might be useful in thinking our dilemma through in more detail. Dennis Domrzalski, writing in …
Continue reading ‘Regional water governance: Rio Rancho, Albuquerque and the question of scale’ »
Albuquerque meteorologist Brian Guyer, who seems to be as obsessed as I am with the early snowmelt, plotted up the latest flow in the Azotea Tunnel* this year, compared with the long term median: * Azotea delivers New Mexico’s San Juan-Chama Project water from a trio of streams in southern Colorado.
Today’s high in Durango was 59F (15C), 18 degrees above the 1981-2010 average for Feb. 8. In the mountains to the east – the mountains that provide Albuquerque’s San Juan-Chama drinking water – the snow has already begun to melt. The snowpack there is lousy to begin with – 62 percent of normal for this …
Continue reading ‘Very early runoff for the San Juan-Chama project’ »