A small but interesting water law/politics/policy case is emerging in northern New Mexico, involving a request by a Sangre de Cristo mountains ski area to use more water for its snow-making equipment. This is the sort of case that hinges on the withdrawal/consumption distinction – how much water a user withdraws from the system, versus …
Continue reading ‘Water transfers: the view from downstream’ »
If you needed another prod to sign up as a CoCoRaHS weather observer, now you can get PRISM data for your own neighborhood. I’ve got 13 years of precip data for my house, first as part of the Albuquerque National Weather Service’s CityNet program, and now as a CoCoRaHS observer. But 13 years is too short …
Continue reading ‘Heineman-Fleck house monthly climate report, now with new improved PRISM data’ »
The folks on the Inkstain Economics Desk point to an intriguing puzzle, in the form of 22 shipping containers out behind the neighborhood MegaWalMart this morning. We’ve long used the Cheap Shit From China index (CSFC) here at Inkstain as a crude but useful economic barometer. The premise is this: WalMart has better data than …
Forgot to blog earlier in the week, a frustratingly inconclusive newspaper piece on the reasons behind the rising cost of refurbishing the US stockpile of B61 bombs: Is Sandia National Laboratories to blame for cost overruns in the multibillion-dollar effort to refurbish the U.S. arsenal of B61 nuclear bombs? A December 2011 evaluation by the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: more on the B61’ »
In the midst of reading Nate Silver’s book, I felt like I ought to say something nuanced about the seasonal forecast that came out this morning: In this morning’s briefing, the forecasters were careful to explain that they’re not making predictions here, but rather forecasting odds – “probabilistic” in the jargon: “These impacts are not …
The typical “out with the old” etc. celebrations don’t have much resonance as New Mexico stares down a new water year. From the morning paper: New Mexico faces three problems in the new water year. The first problem is the winter forecast itself. There were signs of an El Niño forming, a climate pattern driven …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Happy New Water Year!’ »
There’s a truism in water politics and policy in the western United States that “water flows uphill to money”. But is it correct? I ran across it most recently in an excellent editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune regarding the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s proposal to build a pipeline to rural Nevada, along the Utah …
Continue reading ‘Does water really flow uphill toward money?’ »
Sept. 30 is the end of the “water year”*, and it’s been another dry one at the Heineman-Fleck house. With data back to the 1999-2000 year now, this is the fourth consecutive dry year relative to my personal long term mean here in Albuquerque’s near northeast heights: * Water managers here usually (though not for …
From this week’s Albuquerque Journal, a piece looking at the history and future of the notion of “beneficial use” in western water law: The doctrine’s history is bound up in the ideas of the generation of European immigrants who swept across the region in the 1800s, establishing what became United States law. “The climate is …
Continue reading ‘beneficial use: quaint, yet enduringly sturdy’ »
From the morning paper, an attempt to frame and make sense of the questions Congress will face in coming years and the views of New Mexico’s Senate candidates thereon: Nuclear weaponry is big business in New Mexico. More than 20,000 people work at Sandia and Los Alamos labs, two of the nation’s three nuclear weapon …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: politics and the nuclear labs’ »