No Endangered Species Act litigation required for this project on the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico: The Rio Grande is recovering some native vegetation with irrigation water typically used by farmers. The International Boundary and Water Commission oversees water treaties between the United States and Mexico. But lately the agency has invested in river …
Continue reading ‘What water sharing and collaboration can look like’ »
Not a big fire, or a bad fire, at least not yet. Until humans arrived in force to change things, fires were common in those mountains. It’s a fire-adapted ecosystem. We’ve got to get used to the smoke.
Readers of this blog tend to be self-selected group (I’m looking at you, water nerds), so the fact the bulk of the West’s water goes to farming is not news to you. But my hunch (without any data) is that this is not well understood among the broader public. Which is who I write for …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: It’s the farms’ »
If I was trying to manage water in California, these maps would give me the heebie-jeebies. It’s from a new paper (AGU-walled) by Zion Klos and colleagues extending our knowledge of the shift from snow to rain in the high country of the western United States as a result of warming temperatures. Here’s why this …
Continue reading ‘In the West, what used to be snow, falling as rain’ »
Summer rains aren’t a big part of the Colorado River Basin’s water supply story, but they don’t hurt. So here’s an optimistic map, published this morning by the Climate Prediction Center: The more interesting maps are the long term ones: You can see that for the lower part of the Colorado River Basin (where I …
Is this what water conservation looks like? I’m not sure who got to decide that 10 inches of precipitation a year (25 cm) or less defines a “desert”, but by that standard my neighborhood barely slips under the line. In the 15 years that I’ve been collecting data, I’ve averaged 9.78 inches, and data from …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert, dying urban tree edition’ »
From the morning newspaper, a column about the assumption embedded in Albuquerque’s water utility budget – that Albuquerque water conservation has hit bottom: [T]he Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority’s latest spending plan bets you’ve finally hit the conservation wall, projecting that from the current 134 gallons per person per day, you’ll go up to …