Albuquerque’s Rio Grande is currently not much of a river. Lissa and I made the rounds this afternoon of a few Rio Grande viewpoints. This is from Albuquerque’s West Bluff neighborhood, on the west side of the river north of downtown. The bridge in the distance is Montaño. With an abysmal snowpack, the river was …
This is such an old story, but the new garb makes an interesting side-by-side comparison: a community faces tension as a new water user comes to town. In Barnhart, in West Texas, it’s fracking for oil: The Barnhart area has been hard-hit by drought, he said, just as surging oil and gas drilling activities have …
Continue reading ‘Q: What do fracking and viticulture have in common?’ »
Southern California, if I may quote myself, didn’t have enough water to support a city, “so they built three great rivers.” Not one or two. Three aqueducts to carry water to “the southland”, as we called it in my youth. The audacity of that act is captured in this map I stumbled across today, from …
Continue reading ‘The audacity of building rivers: Parker Dam and the Colorado River Aqueduct’ »
If one wanted the Kansas portion of the Ogallala Aquifer to last forever, to be farmable sustainably in perpetuity, one would need to cut back current groundwater mining by 80 percent to bring withdrawals into line with natural recharge, according to a new study published last week in PNAS. That ain’t gonna happen. But even …
I’m thinking I may need to update my tree rings book, or write a new one. Much of my focus was on measurements of tree ring width, which makes sense. If you pick the right tree, the ring width can tell you whether a year was dry or wet. Thin rings mean the tree didn’t …
Continue reading ‘Tree rings: it’s not just the width any more, it’s the isotopes’ »
From the morning paper, the fruits of a trip to Farmington, in northwest New Mexico, for a legislative hearing on water. Among the items on the agenda, water use in oil and gas production: The problem, according to Egolf and others, is that the state lacks comprehensive data on how much water is being used …
Cynthia Barnett has an article in the fascinating new environmental publication Ensia about the problems we face globally because we’re pumping water out of the ground faster than nature puts it back in. One of the things I like about Cythia’s writing on water is her optimistic, solutions-oriented approach: The solutions to overdrawn aquifers are …
Continue reading ‘Global groundwater trends – not encouraging’ »
Antoine Abou-Diwan had an interesting story over the weekend in the Imperial Valley Press suggesting fallowing, rather than more sophisticated agricultural water conservation approaches, has become the default standard for water savings in the Imperial Valley needed to meet the Imperial Irrigation District’s obligations under California’s Quantification Settlement Agreement. Under the QSA, water saved in …
Continue reading ‘Fallowing – the path of least resistance?’ »
Lake Como, the Italian lake on which the real village of Bellagio sits, averages 42 inches of rain per year. The Las Vegas, NV, replica averages less than 5 inches. But they built a little lake thingie, and it’s got an awesome fountain:
A new paper by Darrin Ficklin and colleagues anticipates drying in the Upper Colorado River Basin, especially in its southern region: The shift from semi-arid to arid conditions is likely to be especially prominent for the southern and central subbasins of the UCRB. Climate Change Impacts on Streamflow and Subbasin-Scale Hydrology in the Upper Colorado …
Continue reading ‘Increasing aridity in the Colorado River Basin’ »