One of my happy new discoveries among people writing about water in this time of drought is a guy named Dan Macon, who raises grass-fed lambs in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California. Mason’s one of those people who depend on water from the sky rather than irrigation water from a canal or groundwater pump, …
March – July snowmelt runoff on central New Mexico’s Rio Grande, which provides the bulk of the river’s water, is forecast to be 44 percent of the 1981-2010 average, according to a federal forecast out this morning. The measurement point for that number is the Otowi Bridge, which is on the road from Santa Fe to …
Continue reading ‘Rio Grande runoff forecast: 44 percent at Otowi’ »
Nathanael Johnson at Grist continues his excellent work digging past the noise to try to help us understand what’s really going on with California’s drought. Today it’s a deep dive into water markets, which includes this great explanation of why they’re so hard in practice: It’s tricky to show that the water you’re selling is …
Continue reading ‘Why water markets are hard – what economists call “transaction costs”’ »
Arizona lawyer Grady Gammage, a member of that state’s water establishment, opened a conference I attended last week with an explanation of why he became so engrossed in trying to understand “the Law of the River,” that bundle of laws and customs that govern the management and distribution of the waters of the Colorado River. …
Continue reading ‘The Code of the Pirates and the Law of the River’ »
The National Park Service with a warning for Lake Mead boaters as the big reservoir, a recreational favorite outside Las Vegas, drops to record lows: From the Park Service’s Lake Mead facebook page
Tina Shields, the Colorado River Resources Manager for California’s big Imperial Irrigation District, joked Friday about the newfound celebrity of the California almond. Used to be, alfalfa was the alleged water waster that got all the attention. “The best thing for alfalfa growers is almonds,” Shields quipped at one point during a Las Vegas Colorado …
Continue reading ‘Almond growers – the alfalfa farmer’s new best friend’ »
I sent Lissa a picture from the Arizona side overlook of Hoover Dam this evening. Her response: “You can almost see its feet.” I drove out from Las Vegas to see Lake Mead and Hoover Dam this evening after a two-day Colorado River law and policy conference in a windowless hotel meeting room. Speaker after …
While we’ve all been obsessing over the elevation of Lake Mead, there’s a second looming lake elevation problem that could really complicate Colorado River management and increases the risk of a 2016 Arizona shortage declaration beyond the current estimates. Depending on how things play out over the next couple of months, this second problem could …
Tony Davis reports the Bureau of Reclamation’s latest model runs up the odds of a 2016 Lower Basin shortage declaration to one in three: The odds of a shortage in water deliveries to Arizona and other Lower Colorado River Basin states in 2016 are now 33 percent, up from 21 percent as predicted in January, …
Continue reading ‘Risk of Colorado River shortage declaration rising’ »
In Las Vegas for a two-day conference on the Colorado River law and policy. Checked into my hotel room, looked out the window to see the Bellagio Fountains: My life has become self-parody.