Archive of posts filed under the water category.

In California, you can’t charge water hogs more than the rest of us

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Crazy California’s proclivity for “governance by voter initiative” seems to have just undercut one of the major tools in the municipal water conservation kit. Tiered water rates, in which residents are charged a low rate for basic needs and increasingly higher rates for high usage, violate California law, according to a court ruling handed down …

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Precipitation-runoff relationships in sustained drought

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This paper is measuring stuff in Australia, but seems to mimic the dropoff in runoff we’re seeing on the Rio Grande and other western U.S. rivers compared to the precipitation deficits we’re experiencing: Annual rainfall and runoff records from south-eastern Australia are used to examine whether interdecadal climate variability induces changes in hydrological behavior. We test …

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In California drought, when the water’s not fer fightin’ over

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What to make of this California drought story from Alex  Breitler? Farmers within the Delta and farmers south of the Delta aren’t exactly bosom buddies. Not when it comes to water. But this spring, as their lawyers geared up for another year of fighting over limited supplies, farmers on both sides quietly started talking. They …

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Deconstructing media coverage of the California drought

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Brian Devine has written one of those special pieces that made me smack my forehead repeatedly and say, “Yeah, that!”: To conflate the myriad problems of water in California into a single problem is the hallmark of a generalist reporter on deadline, as if I wrote that the Detroit auto industry’s collapse was because they made …

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You should read Cynthia Barnett’s new book, “Rain”

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I presume that the audience for this blog is, in significant measure, made of people who think a lot about water. Many of your are probably already familiar with Florida write Cynthia Barnett’s books, Mirage, and Blue Revolution. For you, the news that Cynthia has a new book is self-recommending. There’s so much good to …

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Decades of dry on the Rio Grande

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Seventeen of the last 20 years have had below-average runoff at Otowi (north-central New Mexico) on the Rio Grande: That’s from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s 2015 Annual Operating Plan presentation, done in Albuquerque last week. “Average” is the 1895-2014 mean.

Southwest monsoon!

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Sorry, that was a clickbait headline. Let me walk it back: Odds shifted slightly toward a wetter Southwest monsoon this summer!   The usual forecast explainer: this shifts the odds from the climatological one-in-three-years-is-wet statistical binning to a 33-40 percent chance of wet in the light green area, upwards of 40 percent in the dark …

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What do we mean by drought?

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Darren Ficklin at Indiana University has a new paper exploring trends in drought in the United States which notes that the trends are not universal: [F]our regions of increasing (upper Midwest, Louisiana, southeastern United States (US), and western US) and decreasing (New England, Pacific Northwest, upper Great Plains, and Ohio River Valley) drought trends…. But …

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Lake Powell takes a big hit in latest Bureau forecast

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More than a million acre feet of water disappeared from Lake Powell in the latest U.S. Bureau of Reclamation operational forecast for the 2015 water year, translating to a 13 foot drop in the big Colorado River reservoir’s projected end-of-September elevation in this month’s forecast compared to just a month ago. The change in this …

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