When you sell less water, you make less money selling water. It’s the modern water agency dilemma: Albuquerque’s municipal water agency may need another rate increase to dig out of a growing financial hole left by the community’s water conservation success, agency officials acknowledged in a report this week to their board.
I wrote a story in this morning’s newspaper about New Mexico’s efforts to revive its moribund state water planning process: Ten years after New Mexico officials last took a stab at developing a state water plan, they are reviving their effort to calculate the gaps between New Mexico’s finite water supplies and the needs of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: New Mexico water planning’ »
Reed Benson, a University of New Mexico law professor whose patient explanations and deep writing have been extraordinarily helpful to my understand of things like the doctrine of prior appropriation and the Endangered Species Act, has joined the blogoworld: It has come to my attention … that a lot of people do not read law …
Continue reading ‘Here’s a new western water blog worth adding to your RSS feed’ »
From the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Yuma, Ariz., and El Centro, Calif., had the highest unemployment rates in October, 31.9 percent and 25.2 percent, respectively. These folks are getting a lot of Colorado River water. There’s seasonality to the resulting ag work economies, but really, this is a graph of economic suckage:
According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s new Consumptive Uses and Losses Report (pdf), consumptive use of Colorado River water in the states of the upper basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and a sliver of Arizona) reached 4.281 million acre feet in 2011, the highest on record. The previous high was 4.245 million acre …
Continue reading ‘Record Upper Colorado River Basin water use in 2011’ »
From Jonathan Overpeck last month in Nature (gated): The complexity of these megadroughts still defies complete explanation and yet it implies that unusually persistent anomalies of sea surface temperature can combine with amplifying changes in vegetation and soil to drive droughts that — if they happened today — would outstrip many of our institutional capacities …
Charlie Luce from the U.S. Forest Service’s Boise Aquatic Sciences Laboratory and colleagues have a paper in the most recent Science examining the question of whether declining westerlies are behind the changing snowpack in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest: Decreases in lower-tropospheric winter westerlies across the region from 1950-2012 are hypothesized to have reduced …
Continue reading ‘Declining westerlies and Pacific Northwest hydrology: a hypothesis’ »
On this holiday, we can give thanks that the snowpack in the Upper Colorado River Basin is more than twice as big as last year at this time. It’s actually (#dontjinx) above average:
Henry Brean reports on lawn removal efforts in Las Vegas, Nev.: Since the turf rebate program was launched in 1999, it has paid out $189 million in rebates and helped eliminate more than 167 million square-feet of thirsty grass, saving an estimated 9 billion gallons of water per year. Translated: a reduction of approximately 4,000 …
Continue reading ‘Municipal and agricultural use of Colorado River water: a comparison’ »
I had a couple of pieces in the newspaper last week about New Mexico’s long term water usage trends. I wrote the stories because the data, a time series I assembled by reviewing state water use reports, surprised me: Water for household use peaked in 1995 and has been declining ever since, according to state …