The latest monthly Colorado River water management report from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (pdf) takes a major step toward the river’s first ever shortage declaration. We’ll know more in a month, but the preliminary estimates now show drops in the level of Lake Powell by the end of this year could trigger provisions of …
Continue reading ‘Creeping toward shortage on the Colorado River’ »
Brett Walton explains new research on the water lost in the Great Texas Drought of 2011. It’s a lot. But the thing that caught my eye was where most of the water loss occurred: “Groundwater depletion can be significant locally. However, by taking Texas as a whole, most water depletion comes from soil moisture during …
Continue reading ‘Texas drought: it’s all about the soil moisture’ »
Doing daily journalism on the declining Rio Grande, I have frequent occasion to use this handy tool from the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District and the Bureau of Reclamation. It gives close-to-real time readings on all the main river and irrigation system gauges: It occurs to me that its crisp reductionism rather supports my recent …
An AP story that made the rounds yesterday pointed out that Phoenix set an all-time water consumption record during last weekend’s heat wave: Water Services Department spokesman David Cerull tells radio station KJZZ that homeowners used most of the water. He says demand generally goes up when it gets hot and that people water their …
Continue reading ‘Is Phoenix’s fondness for lawns and pools really a water management strength?’ »
Kate Galbraith in the New York Times last week had a piece with another example of how farmers respond when the water begins to run out: Mr. Grall’s cornfield is part of a closely watched demonstration project aimed at showing farmers how to use less irrigation water on their crops. It was put together by …
An experiment in repeat photography on a dwindling Rio Grande.
Trying an experiment here (because there are some things you can’t get to work on your employer’s production server) [View the story “A dwindling Rio Grande” on Storify]
From the morning paper, Day 1 (Day N?) of my Rio Grande death watch: JARALES – There’s a great line about New Mexico’s central river, often attributed to Will Rogers: “The Rio Grande is the only river I ever saw that needed irrigation.” Whether Rogers said it or not (and there is some question), it …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: irrigating the Rio Grande’ »
Smart Jay Lund piece on the shortcomings of old-school environmentalism in the new world: Classical environmentalism is mostly about stopping new harmful human influences, not reversing the harmful effects of past changes or shaping a more environmentally friendly future. Environmentalism has not substantially reversed the widespread urban and agricultural destruction of wetlands or freed rivers …
Continue reading ‘Lund on a call for a new environmentalism’ »
The folks at the University of Colorado’s Colorado River Governance Initiative have a clever idea to keep the Upper Basin states from getting screwed by climate change. Their new Upper Basin Voluntary Demand Cap white paper (pdf) offers a solution path for one of the stickiest problems in future Colorado Basin water management under climate change. In …