Sharlene Leurig: We dug through a ton of data to learn what we could about how much water in Texas rivers comes from groundwater. We were really amazed to find that in an average year, not a drought year, anywhere between 15 and 40 percent of a river’s flow comes from the water below ground. …
Continue reading ‘The groundwater-surface water connection’ »
The Colorado River isn’t very big here, but there’s still enough water in it to drop a pump and irrigate a crop. This is on a weird little geographic island, a chunk of land that is on the west (California) side of the river, but legally in Arizona – left stranded when the Colorado River …
Continue reading ‘It’s not all Hoover Dam and giant canals’ »
“Collaboration is a much better way of working than litigation.” – Estevan López, Commissioner, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, during today’s festivities marking the tenth anniversary of the Multi-Species Conservation Program on the Lower Colorado River. Jerry Zimmerman, former executive director of the Colorado River Board of California, told a story this morning about how the …
Continue reading ‘Habitat conservation on the Lower Colorado’ »
I spent much of today in Bard, which is one of the oldest western U.S. irrigation projects of the modern era. It’s modest – about 15,000 irrigated acres, roughly half on the Quechan Indian reservation and half non-Indian land, on the California side, just across the Colorado River from Yuma. Medjool dates are a thing …
Continue reading ‘In the Reservation Canal, a full supply’ »
It’s looking increasingly likely that some of this year’s “bonus water”, extra releases from Glen Canyon Dam to bolster supplies in Lake Mead outside Las Vegas, is evaporating with our dwindling Rocky Mountain snowpack. The folks at the Bureau of Reclamation have been careful since the beginning in telling us that the bonus water was …
Continue reading ‘The impact of our disappearing snowpack on Lake Mead’ »
“Over this bridge drought refugees are crossing the Colorado River into California.” – Dorothea Lange, 1935 One more great bit of American history as I get ready to head off to Yuma. I love this picture. From the Library of Congress’s remarkable collection of Dorothea Lange’s work in the American Desert during the Depression.
I stumbled this evening across this 2009 piece by the Public Policy Institute of California which seems quite timely: The Myth The popular press often propagates the myth that California is running out of water. As a recent example: “Have you seen Lake Oroville lately? If so, you know California is running out of water” …
Continue reading ‘The problem with the “running out of water” rhetoric’ »
update: The preliminary human-in-the-loop forecast is substantially better than the automated one, at 55 percent. But still terrible. previously: The preliminary Rio Grande forecast for April 1 is just 33 percent of the 1981-2000 average, a dramatic reduction since the March 1 forecast that shows just how abysmally warm and dry the month of March …
Continue reading ‘Preliminary Rio Grande runoff: 55 percent through Central New Mexico’ »
Water markets – willing buyers and willing sellers, to get water moved from places with a lot to places that need it really bad – are a hot topic of conversation right now, what with California’s big drought and all. Brian Devine at the University of Colorado has a nice post up this week explaining …
Continue reading ‘Some difficulties in setting up water markets’ »
The April-July runoff forecast into Lake Powell, on the Arizona-Utah border, is just 52 percent of the long term mean, according to new numbers out today from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. That is roughly 1.3 million acre feet less water flowing into Lake Powell than the forecast of just a month ago, the …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River Basin forecast: where’d that 1.3 million acre feet go?’ »