Readers of this blog tend to be self-selected group (I’m looking at you, water nerds), so the fact the bulk of the West’s water goes to farming is not news to you. But my hunch (without any data) is that this is not well understood among the broader public. Which is who I write for …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: It’s the farms’ »
Here’s The Nature Conservancy’s Brian Richter, in his new book Chasing Water, describing what the solution space for the Colorado River Basin’s water problems might look like: Even though urban water uses (for domestic, commercial, and industrial purposes) account for only a minor share of total water use in most water-stressed places, urban water …
Continue reading ‘Why it’s not about the Bellagio Fountain redux – a peek into the solution space’ »
I love this picture. E.C. LaRue was a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist who in 1916 assembled the first attempt at a rigorous scientific survey of the water resources of the Colorado River Basin. Water Supply Paper No. 395 will never be mistaken for great literature. LaRue was one of America’s early technocrats, intellectual ancestors of …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River history pic Sunday: If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ »
This is a picture of the downstream side of Morelos Dam, on the U.S. Mexico border west of Yuma, Ariz. I took it in March, when there was water flowing downstream, into Mexico. That is an unusual sight. This is usually the point where the Colorado River ends. It’s not entirely clear to me where …
tl;dr Vegas is an easy target, but Lake Mead’s problems involve far more than Sin City’s profligacy. Longer version: As Lake Mead drops toward a record low some time next month, there’s a temptation to draw a dotted line to the Bellagio Fountain, 30 miles to the west, and point a finger of blame. It’s …
If I was trying to manage water in California, these maps would give me the heebie-jeebies. It’s from a new paper (AGU-walled) by Zion Klos and colleagues extending our knowledge of the shift from snow to rain in the high country of the western United States as a result of warming temperatures. Here’s why this …
Continue reading ‘In the West, what used to be snow, falling as rain’ »
Reed Benson: I think the states, whatever their intentions, have the same trouble standing up to their politically powerful water users as they do their polluting industries. Federal oversight can help make sure the states don’t just serve their local interests at the expense of the environment, tribes, or downstream states. The entire post is …
Continue reading ‘The federal role in environment and water’ »
A century and a half ago, there was enough water in the Yuma stretch of the Colorado River to sink a steamboat: On this date in 1854, the first steamer on the Colorado River, The Uncle Sam, sank at Pilot Knob. Today, it’s pickups, stuck in the sand: Yuma Station agents patrolling near the Colorado …
Continue reading ‘Steamboats and pickup trucks in the Colorado River’ »
Preparing a talk I’m giving next week about Minute 319, the Colorado River environmental pulse flow and its broader implications for western water management, I ran across this new piece by environmental journalist Cesar Angulo about the mixed feelings in Mexico about the effort: According to Arroyo Gonzalez, these reforestation projects have a very positive …
Continue reading ‘South of the border, tension about highest and best use of Colorado River water’ »
Summer rains aren’t a big part of the Colorado River Basin’s water supply story, but they don’t hurt. So here’s an optimistic map, published this morning by the Climate Prediction Center: The more interesting maps are the long term ones: You can see that for the lower part of the Colorado River Basin (where I …