Western Colorado has some pretty
The green strip in the fading sunlight is pasture, irrigated with Colorado River tributary water.
Archive of posts filed under the water category.
Despite drought, California farm employment rising
I sometimes think that, in trying to understand the impacts of drought, we pay too much attention to the water numbers. It’s not that it doesn’t matter how much is in the reservoir, or is being pumped from the ground, but it’s only the first link in the chain of impacts. California economist Jeff Michael …
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El Niño/Colorado River Basin update
Since I wrote last month about the impact (or lack of impact) of El Niño on Colorado River flows, Paul Miller at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center has done a new, more detailed analysis than the one I showed (which I had attributed to the Central Arizona Project folks, but which originally came from CBRFC): …
A promising seasonal forecast for the Colorado River Basin
The federal Climate Prediction Center’s seasonal forecast, out this morning, looks promising for the Colorado River Basin: These forecast maps can be visually deceptive. The greens mean a shift of odds toward wetter weather, not a forecast that we should expect wetter weather. Dice, loaded slightly in our favor. You can see all the precip …
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Cynthia Barnett’s “Rain” a National Book Award finalist
So excited for my friend Cynthia Barnett, whose book Rain: A Natural and Cultural History is a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Award (pdf). It’s a great book. You should read it.
Las Vegas to help out Southern California with 150,000 acre feet of Colorado River water
The Southern Nevada Water Authority’s board will take up a proposal this Thursday to ship 150,000 acre feet of Las Vegas’s unused Colorado River water to Southern California to help out during California’s epic drought. The water will help the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California make up for shortfalls in its supplies from Northern …
A Colorado River water use I can get behind: Palisade peaches
I assume this bluff above Palisade, Colorado, explains the name: Those are peach trees in the foreground, irrigated by water from the Orchard Mesa Irrigation District, which first turned water in 1904 onto what a friend calls “as fertile a swath of God’s green earth as there is in the West.” The district’s water now …
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Grand Junction: A view from higher up in the watershed
The question of what is included in the “Colorado River Basin” is in part a legal one. The seven-state Colorado River Compact of 1922 defined a weird legal geography: [T]he term “Colorado River Basin” means all of the drainage area of the Colorado River System and all other territory within the United States of America …
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Cohen sees signs for Salton Sea optimism
Mike Cohen, writing for National Geographic’s “Water Currents”, explains what’s at stake in the current discussions over what to do to mitigate reduced flows to the Salton Sea as ag water conservation efforts in Imperial Valley grow: The shrinking Salton Sea will expose tens of thousands of acres of lakebed. The dry lakebed could emit …
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To deal with water scarcity, you need the right tools
Lauren Steely: For a century, water management in the West was an engineering profession. Now it must be an economics profession.