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 …
In Scottsdale, AZ, there’s a business called Desert Cadillac. It sells cars, apparently without irony.
tl;dr – In 1960, U.S. Supreme Court Special Master Simon Rifkind made a fundamental mistake in calculating how much water was then available in the Colorado River Basin, and how much might be available in the future. The court, in its ruling in the case of Arizona v. California, accepted Rifkind’s math. The consequence is …
Continue reading ‘Simon Rifkind’s great mistake and the shortfall on the Colorado River’ »
Does this simply represent hardening of demand – the result of low-hanging conservation fruit being mostly all plucked? Or does this suggest arid Arizona is not headed toward the big water-driven economic collapse some people fear?
I’m looking forward to Requiem for the Santa Cruz: An Environmental History of an Arizona River, a forthcoming University of Arizona Press book by Robert Webb, Julio Betancourt and colleagues. While we spend a lot of time talking about how to return water to rivers in the arid southwestern United States, this group of authors …
Continue reading ‘River restoration – it’s all about the groundwater’ »