Archive of posts filed under the water category.
The Bard
A Freakish Heat Wave – A Statistical Wonder
Words fall short as we watch the West’s snowpack disappear under the glare of a heat wave so off-the-charts, so freakish, that I had to resort to some pretty extreme math to try to understand how freakishly off-the-charts this is. We’ve got more than a century of weather records in Albuquerque, with really good ones …
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The Colorado River and the Tragedy of the Anti-Commons
“It is as dry as it has ever been.”
Update: Apologies to Norm Gaume and the Water Advocates for screwing up the link to the original quoted piece, which is shared here via Creative Commons copyright [CC BY SA]. Original post: Terrific visualizations from the Water Advocates of the state of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande: Water Demands and the Effective Water Supply Stress …
Quoting Jeff Kightlinger and Jim Lochhead
As the former CEOs of two of the largest water utilities using water from the Colorado River, we have been deeply engaged in interstate and federal negotiations on the river for over 30 years. Those negotiations were tough, but the basin states ultimately reached agreement, including reducing California’s use of water by 800,000 acre-feet and …
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In which my colleagues and I share thoughts on the future of Colorado River governance
It is hard to know where to begin. The Department of the Interior’s Post-2026 Colorado River draft environmental impact statement, and the deep questions it raises, is an “everything including the kitchen sink” sort of process. But at its root, the question it raises is simple: Tell us what you’re going to do. It is …
Colorado River news isn’t all bad!
I’ve been pretty successfully checked out of Colorado River work while I put the finishing touches on the new book (pre-order now!) but my colleagues are on it with a new post looking at the over-winter storage at the big reservoirs behind Hoover and Glen Canyon dams: This feels like good news, or least not …
Quoting Rolf Schmidt-Petersen on water management in New Mexico in 2002
2002 snowpack and runoff were terrible on the Rio Grande and San Juan. Think the San Juan Chama Project diverted about 6,000 acre-feet into the Rio Grande that year (normal would be between 80,0000 and 120,000 acre-feet. Heck, for Colorado on the mainstem Rio Grande, we had to negotiate a new delivery by Colorado to …
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Colorado River Assigned Water: Quoting Sorensen et al
For more than a century of development, Colorado River governance has lived under atension between individual communities’ desires to use more water and the collectiveneed to balance basin-scale supply and use for the benefit of the region as a whole.Incentives favoring individual communities at the expense of the collective good havebrought us to the edge …
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