By Jack Schmidt and John Fleck John C. Page, Commissioner of Reclamation, reported to Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, in announcing the growth of Lake Mead, that the indications are enough water will be caught and stored by Boulder Dam this spring to put the operations of the Boulder Dam plant on a …
The latest European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts got some ink/bits for their strong forecast for a wet winter in California (h/t Daniel Swain), but what do they say for us? Sorry for the blocky look, but when you drill down, the map gets pretty coarse – these are big pixels. But the headline is …
Continue reading ‘“Super” El Niño meh in the Rio Grande and Colorado River headwaters?’ »
Near-extinct oryx are returning. Farms are prospering as irrigation water reaches fields for the first time in decades. Farmers are even nurturing new trees on their land. Once a byword for drought and famine, the African Sahel region on the southern flank of the Sahara Desert now has more water than it has for decades. …
Communities continue to face different groundwater realities, different economies and different views about water management. But as groundwater challenges become harder to ignore, many are reaching the same conclusion: Waiting for someone else to solve the problem isn’t a strategy. Faith Kearns on new Arizona research on rural community response to groundwater challenges
On the implications of total Mead-Powell storage reaching record lows: The big questions that are implied by where we’re at are ones that absolutely need to be addressed, but they’re not going to be addressed now. I mean, we can’t even have functional conversations about how to reduce consumptive use. – Jack Schmidt, quoted by …
On Sunday, the Colorado River passed a grim milestone. Total combined storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell dropped to a historic low. It was my Wilburys colleague Jack Schmidt who noticed the milestone: On Sunday, July 12, the surface of Lake Powell was 3524.32 feet above sea level, and the surface of Lake Mead …
People are finally starting to say the quiet parts, the parts so many Upper Basin people have been grumbling about in private, out loud. Via an incredibly important Heather Sackett story: Colorado Sen. Dylan Roberts, a District 8 Democrat who represents several Western Slope counties, including Eagle, Grand, Garfield, Routt and Summit, asked Colorado’s lead …
Continue reading ‘Cracks in the Upper Colorado River Basin wall’ »
Via Alicia Inez Guzmán at Source New Mexico, we learn that the federal government is no longer paying the cost of monitoring Rio Grande flows at the intake to Santa Fe communities’ Buckman Direct Diversion as part of a joint effort to ensure that contamination from nuclear weapons work at Los Alamos National Laboratory doesn’t …
A grab bag from my friends and colleagues working on Colorado River issues…. The good news From friend of Inkstain Karl Flessa (the guy who helped get me started thinking about the Colorado River Delta), a new analysis concluding that despite the terrible hydrology and political difficulties, environmental restoration work in the delta is working: …
Continue reading ‘Some good Colorado River news, some bad news, and a request for help’ »