Charmed by yesterday’s trip north to see snow, I rode my bike up to the Alameda Bridge today to see the result. You can see from the picture that the Rio Grande at 2,000 cubic feet per second is sufficient to begin overtopping the sandbar island in the middle of the river. Lots more snow …
Continue reading ‘Water in the Desert: 2008 Runoff Edition’ »
As Scot points out, there’s a crapload of snow all over the western U.S. right now. That’s probably the most interesting bit from a climatological perspective. You typically see wet up north and dry down south, or vice versa. But we’ve also hit a warm spell down here, which means you’re starting to see things …
A good year for the minnows
My homeys at New Mexicans for Science and Reason have a great radio show on Saturday afternoons (2 p.m., 1350 a.m. in Albuquerque). But the only place I have an am radio is in the car, and I’m almost never in my car at the right time. Now, thanks to the magic of PodGoobers, you …
Having recently read Richard Florida’s “The Rise of the Creative Class“, and having heard a great deal of rhetoric locally about the importance of creative class economy issues to Albuquerque’s future, it occurs to me that it will be interesting to see how our community’s leadership responds to Thursday’s fire that destroyed the Golden West …
Angostura Dam Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Lissa and I stopped at Angostura Dam on a recent drive up to Santa Fe. It’s the diversion for water used in the Albuquerque reach of the middle Rio Grande. It’s a modest affair, built in the 1930s, just building up enough head to divert water into a concrete …
I stopped on the bike ride today, down by the river, to watch and listen to an enormous flight of sandhill cranes, headed north. I played a bit with the words to describe it (I often “write” while I’m on the bike), but I didn’t come up with anything quite as crisp as Laura Paskus’s …
The inimitable Coco weighs in on the problem of agriculture in the desert: Just how ill-suited desert communities are to agriculture in general depends entirely on the location of the desert community. The short view prevails. It says agriculture isn’t profitable on a small scale. We don’t have enough of it to matter anymore. And …
Seen from the bike today – a woman in Corrales, New Mexico, taking her dogs for a walk.
On the current status of our snowpack: Much of New Mexico is just like the forecasters said we should expect it to be: dry. With La Niña’s cool Pacific waters pushing storms away from us this year, Albuquerque and most points to the south and east have been drier than average since Oct. 1. The …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Forecast Edition’ »