Archive of posts filed under the water category.

Insanely cool new evapotranspiration maps from USGS team

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Evapotranspiration is the combination of water evaporated from soil, surface water, etc., and water transpired from the leaves of plants. It’s an incredibly important measure of what’s going on in the hydrologic system. Which is why I love this new map: From Estimation of Evapotranspiration Across the Conterminous United States Using a Regression With Climate and …

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Watershed stuff

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My friends at Carpe Diem West, who’ve been doing some interesting work on the science/politics/policy interface of watershed restoration, are holding one of those ghastly named but increasingly useful “webinar” things next week: Join the Academy’s first extended webinar taking a closer look at how to value watersheds and the services they provide to downstream …

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Desalination and engineering optimism

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Nearly every time I give a talk on water (which seems to happen frequently lately – wonder if I’ll be less popular as a speaker once the drought ends) I get asked about desalination. It is, as Bettina Boxall noted in a recent LA Times story, the stuff of dreamers: “an inexhaustible, drought-proof reservoir in …

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Desal and the broken windows fallacy

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The “broken windows fallacy” is the economic argument that spending money on X is of intrinsic value because of the jobs created, regardless of the value of the thing being done. The reference to broken windows is the argument’s reductio ad absurdum – hire one person to break a bunch of windows, and a second …

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Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Navajo water rights

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From this morning’s newspaper, a deep dive into the issues surrounding the Navajo Nation’s struggle to secure water rights in northwestern New Mexico: It was 1948. Fred Wilson, New Mexico’s representative to the interstate group working to divide up the waters of the Upper Colorado River Basin, was pleading. “The state of New Mexico wants …

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“we use imported water…”

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Via Nora Reed, via Sociological Images, a particularly odd way of viewing water sustainability in Las Vegas, Nev.: As commenter Rishi noted, “Pretty much all of the water in Las Vegas is imported.” And Vegas is in the midst of an effort to import a whole lot more. Image courtesy Sociological Images, cc, some rights …

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River beat: 54 percent of average runoff into Lake Powell

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The February forecast is for not very much water to flow down the Colorado River and its tributaries into Lake Powell: The dotted line is the median forecast. The solid line above it is the mean. The median forecast is for 54 percent of normal into Lake Powell. The dark blue  bands mean that, even …

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What exactly does the Basin Study mean we need to do?

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Juliet McKenna is on a roll. You should really just skip me and add her to your RSS feed. Her latest entry is a look at the various ways of completing the sentence, “The Colorado River Basin Study is a call to action to….”? Check out her great list. Here’s the reason the diversity of …

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Dust, runoff and the Vegas pipeline

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Juliet McKenna has done a fantastic back-of-the-envelope calculation about potential effect of dust created by Las Vegas, Nevada’s proposed groundwater pumping system. Vegas, you’ll recall, wants to build a pipeline across the state, using groundwater from distant rural areas to fuel growth in that state’s largest metropolis. McKenna notes that various analyses of the project …

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The cost of Arizona water

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An interesting note from the Montgomery and Associates water blog on the financial problems facing the Central Arizona Project, which delivers Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson. If the Board leaves rates alone this year, some customers may be temporarily satisfied. However, financial problems will persist and grow, adding to uncertainty for the future. …

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