One of the significant areas of climate research right for us in the southwestern United States involves work on modeling the large (spatially and temporally) droughts that are so significant in long term human and ecosystem dynamics. These are the ones that are not just one-year whammies, but linger for decades, like the drought of …
The status of the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow raises some fascinating transboundary questions. As water moves across state boundaries, who bears responsibility when upstream actions affect an endangered species in a downstream state? The fish, once found from the mountains of northern New Mexico to the Gulf of Mexico, is gone from all but …
There’s no denying the spectacle of thousands of snow geese. The Jan. 17 Bosque del Apache bird count put the number at the central New Mexico refuge at 55,000. Lissa and I watched entranced this afternoon as some subset of that, many thousands strong, flew and landed and flew again in the north farm fields …
Here’s the entire Rio Grande right now, which easily fits through the slot on the east edge of the Angostura diversion dam north of Albuquerque. No water is being diverted. That’s the whole river you see. This is not unusual. The flow measures about 600 cubic feet per second at the San Felipe gauge a …
Filing some pictures this evening, I came across this, taken in the bed of the Rio Grande beneath the Hatch bridge in southern New Mexico on April 29, 2013: This is the sort of thing Jack Schmidt of the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center was talking about at a conference in Boulder last August when he …
“To say Albuquerque is located in a valley,” Paul Bauer and his colleagues wrote in Albuquerque: A Guide to Its Geology and Culture, “is geologically imprecise.” From Colorado to Texas, the river we today call the “Rio Grande” follows the path of what the geologists call “the Rio Grande rift”. As earth’s crust pulled apart, …
From this morning’s newspaper: The community’s total water use for the year, 32 billion gallons, was the lowest for the metro area since 1983, despite the fact that the population in the utility’s service area has grown 70 percent in the two decades since, according to Katherine Yuhas.
If it’s too intense and too early in the spring, it can blow all the snow and moisture away in the mountains as if winter had never happened. Then there’s no snow to become water to drain into the rivers, to come into the fields. That’s from Stacia Spragg-Braude’s new book If There’s Squash Bugs …