Captain Renault: What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca? Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters. Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert. Rick: I was misinformed.
My new hobby, hunting for pictures of Lake Mead when it was full, led me this evening to the helpful USGS EarthExplorer archives of old U.S. government satellite images, where I found this little beauty. Apologies if it’s a slow load, they’re relatively large image file so interested water nerds can click on it and zoom …
Continue reading ‘The last time Lake Mead was full, as seen from outer space’ »
A great find for Bill Hasencamp’s collection of pictures of Lake Mead full: Optimistically, presumed to be full.
The Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement embodies one of the great experiments in collaborative watershed management under contested conditions, with a complex web of sometimes conflicting interests among agriculture, indigenous communities, fisheries, environmental flows, and power production. It also demonstrates one of the great risks in collaborative water management in the arid West: everyone has to …
Continue reading ‘A farmer’s defense of the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement’ »
I keep asking my friends who manage municipal water systems in the West how low their communities’ water use can go. None of them really know, which is fascinating. Their customers’ water use just keep dropping. I’ve been following a couple of communities particularly closely – Albuquerque (because it’s my home town) and Las Vegas …
Continue reading ‘Albuquerque’s water use down another 3.4 percent in 2015’ »
“When will Lake Mead fill up again? Probably not in our lifetimes,” said Bill Hasencamp, the MWD’s point person for the Colorado River. “If you saw it full, save those pictures.” LA Times My best guess is that the picture above was taken in 1987.
Albuquerque yesterday (Oct. 15) began pumping groundwater from an aquifer in the city’s northeast heights, the first time aquifer storage and recovery in New Mexico has reached the “recovery” phase. New Mexico is late to this party – states around us have been doing this for years. But it’s a huge milestone in water management …
Continue reading ‘Albuquerque recovering stored groundwater, historic first for New Mexico’ »
I’ve been joking to my Colorado River management friends about how I keep trying to leave the Salton Sea out of my book. This effort has been such a failure that the Salton Sea now makes multiple appearances in the current draft. All paths to the end of my book’s argument seem to pass through …
New Mexico journalist (and friend of Inkstain) Laura Paskus today launched a year-long look at climate change in New Mexico. From the opening installment: As the region continues to warm, snowpack will continue to decrease, the snow line will move higher in elevation and farther north, and winter snows will start later and end earlier …
Even with a dose of bonus water transferred from the Upper Colorado River Basin’s storage account to the Lower Colorado River Basin’s storage account, Lake Mead is forecast to drop another five feet between now and the end of September, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s first forecast of the 2015-16 water year. We’re …
Continue reading ‘Lake Mead forecast to drop another 5 feet in the coming year’ »