The Four Corners is a complicated place
The Four Corners is a very big, very arid, and very complicated place.
Archive of posts filed under the New Mexico category.
Little Water
The aptly named “Little Water,” on the Navajo Nation in northwest New Mexico. The weather station at Canyon de Chelly, which looks like it’s about 30 miles away across the border in Arizona, has recorded 1.52 inches (3.86 cm) of rain so far in 2014, which is less than half of mean precip through May …
You can’t use negative water – the dilemma of water policy planning by projection
Kyle Mittan had some nice straight talk recently in the Tucson Weekly from the University of Arizona’s Sharon Megdal about Arizona’s projections that it’ll need another million acre feet per year of water by 2060: “A million acre-feet is a lot of water,” she said. “But is that the right number, or is that symbolic …
14-plus years of drought in New Mexico
Inspired by these insanely cool California drought visualizations from Circle of Blue, here’s a drought history in New Mexico over the last 14 years:
Aztec Motel
In Albuquerque, we frequently tear down our old Route 66 motels, but keep their signs:
Canoeing the Rio Grande pulse flow
This guy paddled past today as I was standing with friends on the bank of the Rio Grande, watching the high flows of this week’s environmental pulse flow through central New Mexico. If you look closely, you can see a bicycle in the front of his canoe. As he rode by, he explained that when …
Rio Grande pulse flow
I had work to do this morning, but this happened and I couldn’t very well not go watch: It’s an environmental pulse flow on the Rio Grande through Albuquerque, creeping down a channel built in 2008 to provide spawning habitat for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow. This is the fourth consecutive very dry year …
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the National Climate Assessment
From the morning paper: New Mexico’s current drought, with dwindling water supplies and increasing wildfire risk, is a taste of our future under climate change, according to a sweeping new federal report released Tuesday. While climate’s natural ups and downs are playing a major role in our current drought, rising greenhouse gases increase the odds …
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Getting my own little pulse flow
It’s lacking the drama of the March Minute 319 pulse flow on the Colorado River, but I’m getting my own little pulse flow on the Rio Grande here in Albuquerque beginning later this week: Beginning Wednesday, central New Mexico will get its river back – for a week. The anemic Rio Grande, parched by drought, …
JR’s garden
I like my friend JR’s attitude toward gardening in the desert: I water almost nothing here. I do throw yesterday’s left over water from Cooper’s bowl on the autumn sage. It keeps the red blossoms coming and the hummingbirds like that. Some days the birds get the left over water. The New Mexico locust gets …