With snow on the mountains to the north, the preliminary forecast circulated yesterday by the Natural Resources Conservation Service calls for 11 percent above average flow on the Rio Grande through central New Mexico into Elephant Butte reservoir. This is early in the season, so there are still huge error bars on the numbers, with …
Continue reading ‘Preliminary forecast for above average flow on New Mexico’s Rio Grande’ »
UC Davis’s Thomas Harter makes an important point in a recent Public Policy Institute of California blog post about California’s evolving effort to manage its groundwater: The state’s new groundwater law requires locals to form groundwater sustainability agencies and develop sustainability plans, and it will be important for farmers and rural communities to actively engage …
Continue reading ‘The importance of local knowledge in groundwater management’ »
Davis Dam has always been overshadowed by its Lower Colorado River siblings – the scale of Hoover Dam, the striking architecture of Parker Dam, the ability of Imperial Dam to move all that water to the farms to the south and west. Davis mostly generates power, and power generation has always been a bit of …
Continue reading ‘Turning on Davis Dam, 65 years ago tomorrow’ »
My California water friends are breathing a tiny bit easier, as an El Niño-fueled jet stream queues up a series of storms for the parched state. But the latest forecast models suggest the Colorado River Basin is going to have to wait its turn. The invaluable Daniel Swain wrote a couple of days ago about …
Continue reading ‘California wetting up, Colorado Basin will have to wait’ »
Michael McGuire reminds us that today is the 116th anniversary of one of the great milestones in the push toward clean and safe drinking water in the urbanized world – the opening of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. This allowed Chicago to dump its sewage into the Mississippi River rather than Lake Michigan, from …
At the risk of repeating myself, Lake Mead ended 2015 with a surface elevation 1,080.91 feet above sea level, its lowest year end since it was filling in 1936. Happy New Year, y’all know what you need to do now.
If you care about Colorado River Basin water, it behooves you to pay attention to the snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada. It’s an entirely different watershed, but 2015 demonstrated how the interconnections in California’s plumbing have left the two inextricably linked. The tl;dr version of two interrelated points below: California’s drought has put pressure on the Colorado …
Continue reading ‘2015 puts Sierra Nevada-Colorado Basin linkage in stark relief’ »
Elephant Butte Reservoir, the largest on the Rio Grande, will end 2015 with roughly 322,000 acre feet of water, or about 16 percent full. That’s up from 11.5 percent last year at this time: Elephant Butte provides water, primarily for irrigation, for southern New Mexico, Texas, and northern Mexico. When Elephant Butte is short, as …
This is fascinating: A survey finds correlations between utilizing an individual water source (e.g. well or spring) and attitudes toward water management and conservation. Compared to respondents with a shared water source, those with an individual source believe they are segregated from regional water concerns. They are less willing to pay for water management or …
Continue reading ‘People on wells less likely to view water management as a shared problem’ »
Water is just water, right? What happened when Sierra Madre, a suburb northeast of Los Angeles, switched from local groundwater to imported Colorado River water is a reminder that, well, no: In 2013, Sierra Madre was forced to begin importing water from the Metropolitan Water District. That led to a new problem. The water source …