Driving up through the Imperial Valley in March, I chanced upon this example of the fading hopes of the town of Brawley. In his maddeningly intriguing book Imperial, William Vollman briefly slips out of the obtuse into this rare moment of clarity: When I began to study the history of the period, my mind remained …
Continue reading ‘Vollman on the economics of Imperial Valley farming’ »
I’ve tried lots of different things to try to communicate the inherent uncertainties (at all time scales) in the forecast business. Here’s another stab at the problem: I feel a little like a cheap carnival barker foretelling you this, but FYI, it looks like El Niño is coming. New Mexico water managers, grappling with their …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: El Niño and the carnival barker’ »
The total combined storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell at the end of September (the close of the “water year”) will be the lowest since 1968, when Powell was first being filled, according to the latest U.S. Bureau of Reclamation “24-Month Study” (pdf). The current forecast calls for Lake Mead’s elevation to be 1,077.93 …
Continue reading ‘Mead, Powell to end year at lowest storage since 1968’ »
But man has in measure changed the desert conditions by storing the waste waters of the mountains and reclaiming the valleys by irrigation. His success has been phenomenal. Out of the wilderness there have sprung farms, houses, towns, cities with their wealth and luxury. But the cultivated conditions are maintained only at the price of …
This guy paddled past today as I was standing with friends on the bank of the Rio Grande, watching the high flows of this week’s environmental pulse flow through central New Mexico. If you look closely, you can see a bicycle in the front of his canoe. As he rode by, he explained that when …
Experimenting with plot.ly as a platform for posting graphs. Nothing here you haven’t already seen:
I had work to do this morning, but this happened and I couldn’t very well not go watch: It’s an environmental pulse flow on the Rio Grande through Albuquerque, creeping down a channel built in 2008 to provide spawning habitat for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow. This is the fourth consecutive very dry year …
Sandra Postel has some interesting insights regarding the proposed Colorado River System Conservation Program: $11 million is a drop in the bucket of what is needed to achieve meaningful conservation savings in the Colorado River Basin. And each of the four cities has substantially more conservation they can do within their own borders. But what is …
Continue reading ‘Sandra Postel on new Colorado River initiative’ »
From the morning paper: New Mexico’s current drought, with dwindling water supplies and increasing wildfire risk, is a taste of our future under climate change, according to a sweeping new federal report released Tuesday. While climate’s natural ups and downs are playing a major role in our current drought, rising greenhouse gases increase the odds …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the National Climate Assessment’ »