With a sub-par snowpack once again in New Mexico’s high country, I got a Twitter question this morning about the last time we’d had a good snowpack. My favorite came in 2008, when I was just starting to track this sort of thing closely: SAN MARCIAL— Water was already lapping at the side of the …
Continue reading ‘On New Mexico’s Rio Grande, a brutal four years’ »
With just a few days left, it looks like Lake Mead will end 2014 down 19 feet, which would be the second biggest one-year drop of the “modern era” (the years since completion of Glen Canyon Dam upstream damped down the river’s ups and downs). With inflow largely regulated by Glen Canyon Dam and outflow largely …
Continue reading ‘Lake Mead in 2014 headed for second biggest drop in modern era’ »
John Van Dyke, in his epic visit to the deserts of western North America a century ago, wrote harshly of their springs: Occasionally one meets with a little stream where a fissure in the rock and a pressure from below forces up some of the water; but these springs are of very rare occurrence. And …
Continue reading ‘the dwindling of California’s “wretched little mud-holes”’ »
Annie Snider left an excellent summary in our Christmas stocking of the state of play on the Colorado River. Lake Mead approaches the end of the Calendar year at elevation 1,087 feet above sea level, which is nearly 20 feet below last year at this time, as basin water managers scramble to build new institutional widgets …
Continue reading ‘Lake Mead: 40 percent full, or 60 percent empty?’ »
In March, President Obama nominated New Mexican Estevan López, who at the time was head of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, to head the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. It was a big deal in a number of ways, not least of which was that, in replacing Mike Connor, López would be the second New Mexican …
“The average daily water consumption across the south east in November 2014 was 190 litres per person per day. This is a stark contrast to consumption levels before the millennium drought, when the region’s residents were using an average of 330 litres per person per day.” That’s Queensland, Australia. To translate to U.S. measures, that’s …
Excited to see Cynthia Barnett’s Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, is now available for pre-order, which means we don’t have to wait too much longer. (If you have time to kill between now and then, may I recommend Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis?)
Even with the release of extra water from upstream reservoirs, Lake Mead outside Las Vegas is forecast to continue dropping in 2015 and into 2016, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s latest monthly “24-Month Study” (pdf). At this point, as Lake Mead drifts deeper into record emptiness, it goes without saying that the big …
Continue reading ‘As Lake Mead drops, Las Vegas plays the long game’ »
So the folks at Island Press will be publishing my book, tentatively titled Beyond the Water Wars, about the problems facing the Colorado River Basin and how we might fix them. I couldn’t be happier. Its basic themes will be familiar to readers of this blog – the end of the age of fat reservoirs and full …
Continue reading ‘Coming, not quite so soon: Beyond the Water Wars’ »
The International Boundary and Water Commission today released its initial science report (pdf) on this spring’s Colorado River pulse flow. A few key bits: When you add water, stuff grows. Satellite imagery in June ’14 compared to a year earlier showed a 36 percent increase in the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. The NDVI increased in all …
Continue reading ‘First Colorado delta pulse flow science findings’ »