Article VII of the Rio Grande Compact is one of the keys to allocating the river’s supply among Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas: Neither Colorado nor New Mexico shall increase the amount of water in storage in reservoirs constructed after 1929 whenever there is less than 400,000 acre feet of usable water in project storage…. …
OtPR the other day suggested compensation as drought mitigation: If the goal is drought resilience, we could use money instead of water to keep farm communities intact until a wet year. If it is important that farm workers in Mendota live decent lives during droughts, we don’t have to find non-existent water for their employers’ farms. We …
Continue reading ‘In Brazil’s drought, compensating the poor’ »
I’ve long dismissed the “pipeline to the Missouri River” (PTM? “canal from the Missouri”? CFM?) and other similar large-scale water importation schemes as vastly impractical distractions from serious water policy (see for example here and here). The argument, which I get regularly from well-meaning readers, points to the big network of oil and gas pipelines spidering across …
OtPR: The range of public water discourse is very narrow; it is all incremental change from how we do things now.
There’s a particularly important passage in Matt Jenkins’ new piece on former Las Vegas water manager Pat Mulroy’s leadership on Colorado Basin issues (behind paywall for now, subscribe!) where he describes an example of a convoluted deal to bank Nevada water in an Arizona aquifer: It was … the first federally sanctioned deal for a …
Continue reading ‘“intentionally created unused apportionment”: gobbledygook for the greater good’ »
My friends at the Middle Rio Grande Water Assembly are gathering Sat., March 21, to discuss strategies for managing water in the face of climate change in the central New Mexico reach of the river: While there is a Regional Water Plan for the three county-area (Sandoval, Bernalillo and Valencia), it is ten years old. …
Continue reading ‘Strategies for Middle Rio Grande water, March 21’ »
I’m fascinated by the geomorphic traces left by the rise and fall of Lake Mead – human scale (egret scale?) shoreline terraces. This is on the northern bank above Boulder Harbor. The bird, shown for scale (I don’t have a rock hammer, it’s a great egret, so quite large), hangs out there because of the …
One of the members of my brain trust was speculating idly the other day about how different the Colorado River dialogue might be if the hydro-geo-chemistry of the bathtub ring was different – if the dropping water didn’t leave a white mark, letting you see how much Lake Mead has dropped, letting people like me …
update, Thursday, 3/5: Final March 1 forecast numbers are in, unchanged for those in the preliminary quoted below. previously: It says something about the drought on New Mexico’s Rio Grande in recent years that a forecast of 67 percent of average runoff into Elephant Butte Reservoir is good news. That’s the mid-point of the preliminary …
Continue reading ‘Rio Grande forecast improves, but that’s not saying much’ »
From Gary Woodard’s work – in Arizona… an annual drop in per-household demand of more than 2 percent between 2000 and 2013 across Maricopa and Pima counties. This trend is expected to extend through 2020, as we continue to replace appliances, fixtures, and landscape plants with new, more water-efficient ones; construct new, more water-efficient homes; and participate in water …
Continue reading ‘How low can municipal water conservation go?’ »