We have a mismatch between 20th century plumbing and a 21st century climate. USGS hydrologist Paul Milly and colleagues in 2008 threw down a marker in a Science paper arguing that human interventions (intentional and not) have rendered a basic premise of human water operations invalid. The premise is “stationarity”, the idea that with data …
Continue reading ‘Stationarity and snowmelt in the Pacific Northwest’ »
Let’s talk about “polycentric governance” and the problem of regional water institutions, shall we? Because here in New Mexico, we seem to have this a bit messed up, and my book research is leading me into some compare-and-contrast exercises that might be useful in thinking our dilemma through in more detail. Dennis Domrzalski, writing in …
Continue reading ‘Regional water governance: Rio Rancho, Albuquerque and the question of scale’ »
Municipal water demand in the West, according to Gary Woodard of Montgomery and Associates in Tucson, has become decoupled from population growth. Here’s a teaser from a talk he’s giving next month in Tucson: The talk, entitled “The surprising slide in domestic demand: Be careful what you wish for,” focuses on the declines in municipal …
Albuquerque meteorologist Brian Guyer, who seems to be as obsessed as I am with the early snowmelt, plotted up the latest flow in the Azotea Tunnel* this year, compared with the long term median: * Azotea delivers New Mexico’s San Juan-Chama Project water from a trio of streams in southern Colorado.
From yesterday’s New York Times: The problem with using ocean water to replenish the lake is that current agricultural runoff adds three million to four million tons of salt per year, Mr. Shintaku said. The same amount of ocean water would add about 10 times as much salt. As the water evaporates, the salt would …
Continue reading ‘Why pumping ocean water into the Salton Sea wouldn’t work’ »
Basic Magnesium Inc. was a water materiel plant built in the desert south of Las Vegas in the early years of World War II. Its owner built a company town to house workers. This picture (which I love) says something powerful about the motivations and practices of turning a pre-fab desert shack into a home.
Today’s high in Durango was 59F (15C), 18 degrees above the 1981-2010 average for Feb. 8. In the mountains to the east – the mountains that provide Albuquerque’s San Juan-Chama drinking water – the snow has already begun to melt. The snowpack there is lousy to begin with – 62 percent of normal for this …
Continue reading ‘Very early runoff for the San Juan-Chama project’ »
The Texas Tribune (which I will never forgive for hiring my pal Jolie McCullough away from Albuquerque) is crowdfunding what sounds like a very interest bit of water journalism: Despite decades and billions of dollars spent trying to provide Texans living along the Mexican border with reliable access to clean drinking water, hundreds of thousands …
January was wet in southern New Mexico: But the farmers of the southern part of the state are among those with the highest drought risk this year. How could that be? Diane Alba Soular does a nice job of explaining that it’s snow in the mountains, which creates Rio Grande runoff, that matters. Rain at the …
Continue reading ‘NM Drought: it depends on where the rain is falling’ »
I have long assumed that the Eastern New Mexico Water Supply Project, also known as the Ute Pipeline, was one of those zombie water projects that never quite dies but will never be built, either. The idea is to build a pipeline from the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission’s Ute Lake on the Canadian River …
Continue reading ‘New life for one of the West’s zombie water projects?’ »