From this morning’s paper, a visit to Embudo, where stream U.S. stream flow measurement began: In the world of U.S. water management, this narrow strip where the river funnels between high bluffs is historic. Powell, most famous as the first person to survey the Grand Canyon, had realized that the ambitions of the continent’s European …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Embudo and the history of measuring water’ »
Here’s a picture of the Rio Grande, at Embudo, with water: Here’s a newspaper story about the Rio Grande, at Albuquerque, without water: Without good summer rains, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque could see its lowest sustained levels since the 1970s, water managers said Wednesday. In the midst of the fourth consecutive year of extreme …
Continue reading ‘stuff I wrote elsewhere: a dry summer on the Rio Grande’ »
From the morning paper: With revenue down as a result of dropping water sales, the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority board at its Wednesday evening meeting will consider a 5 percent rate increase beginning July 1. The average homeowner’s water bill would rise roughly $3 per month, according to a report to be presented …
Now that I’ve figured out how to easily download NASA Landsat imagery, (thanks, USGS!) I don’t think I’m going to get much else done this weekend. It’s an amazing conceptual tool for helping to think about how water moves through western North America. Here’s Albuquerque on April 13, with the colors tweaked to highlight growing plants. …
Continue reading ‘Down the Landsat rabbit hole, Albuquerque edition’ »
Here’s a statistical oddity. Through April 14, we’ve measured 0.4 inches (10 mm) of precipitation at the National Weather Service’s Albuquerque gauge in 2014, about 23 percent of the long term mean. This is the seventh straight year that Albuquerque has been below average through April 14. 2007 is the last calendar year in Albuquerque …
Went with friends this morning in the woods along the Rio Grande in search of porcupines. You’d never know you’re in the middle of New Mexico’s largest metro area. (We found porcupines!)
One of the casualties of drought is the piñon in the mountains of New Mexico. I took this picture back in February in the Sandias, the mountains on the eastern edge of Albuquerque. Where you see snow the slopes are generally north-facing. No snow is south-facing, and that’s where you see brown trees. I tweaked …
If I was a more clever writer, I’d have a joke here about how the statistics of a WIPP accident change now that we’ve got a Bayesian prior: The radiation leak that has shut down the nation’s only operating underground nuclear waste disposal site was, for all practical purposes, never supposed to happen. No one …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the WIPP accident that was never supposed to happen’ »
Ben Cook at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has a new paper that offers a reminder of why the impact of climate change on our ecosystems and water supplies involves more than “will it rain less”? In some sense this is an old and obvious point, which I link here just to repeat said …
Continue reading ‘Climate change in the West: it’s not just about more or less rain’ »