I was walking on the beach this afternoon when this critter poked his/her head out of the surf just offshore, looked around, then made a dash for the nearby woods. Need some lazyweb help – is it a sea otter? update: Via Miriam Bobkoff, via Twitter – “More likely a river otter. His back feet …
My particular view of the water world is constrained by scarcity. We don’t move a lot of cargo on the Rio Grande or the Colorado, the two rivers in my immediate field of view. I forget, and our current trip to the Pacific Northwest has reminded me, of the magic of water in service of …
Ever the journalist in search of gloomy extremes, I just noticed that total storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two largest reservoirs used to manage flows on the Colorado River, is currently forecast (USBR pdf here) to end the current water year at its lowest level since 1968, when Powell, the uppermost reservoir …
Continue reading ‘Total Mead/Powell storage headed for lowest level since Powell first filled’ »
It’s complicated. That’s what I realized this morning as I engaged in the now-nearly-mandatory journalistic self-promotion exercise – tweeting my work. On one of the local water mailing lists, I was recently taken to task for feeding drought paranoia rather than pulling together comprehensive analyses. It’s a fair cop. I’ll try to keep it in …
Continue reading ‘stuff I wrote elsewhere: junior groundwater pumping and the “futile call”’ »
In the midst of our drought, you can still find water if you know where to look. The Rio Grande through Albuquerque is flanked by drains most of the way, ditches dug to intercept groundwater, draining swampy bottomland so it could be farmed and, ultimately, become our urban/suburban landscape. This dog, with help, found the …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert, cute doggie edition’ »
Folks at the newly formed New Mexico Mercury are taking on New Mexico’s water problems in a big way, which I applaud. But, as gently as I can do this, I need to engage them on what I think is a critical issue: their reuse argument: Here’s VB Price: For New Mexico to get its …
Continue reading ‘Tilting carefully at the reuse windmill’ »
Concerned the current drought will end? No worries, climate change has your back: Climate change is likely to render a key part of the water supply for Santa Fe and Albuquerque increasingly unreliable in coming decades, according to a new analysis by federal scientists. The San Juan-Chama project, which imports water from the mountains of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: San Juan-Chama supply at risk from climate change’ »
I spent the morning in an Albuquerque court listening to a fascinating legal argument about water rights. (Update: story from the am newspaper) The real issue, involving the way central New Mexico’s largest irrigation district allocates water, remains undecided – this morning’s ruling was issued based on procedural issues rather than the substance at hand. …
From Atlanta, another example of a concept we’re seeing increasingly here in the western United States – groundwater augmentation of dwindling river supplies: Georgia’s efforts to quench metro Atlanta’s thirst include a $1 billion proposal to pump water from one aquifer to another and then release it into the Flint River in times of drought. …
Continue reading ‘In America, we pump water out of the ground to put it in our rivers’ »
After three recent reporting trips to southern New Mexico, I can’t quite get my head around this: It’s the Rio Grande. The entire stretch through southern New Mexico has been completely dry since last summer, save for a few places where groundwater seeps, either hydrothermal stuff or leakage from upstream dams, wet the channel. …