From Saturday’s newspaper, my story about a state court ruling against a proposed groundwater transfer case in New Mexico: State officials made clear Friday that, while they ruled against this application because of its failure to specify where and how the water would be used, they do not in general oppose water transfers around the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: court rules against New Mexico water transfer’ »
A new paper in today’s Nature by Justin Sheffield and colleagues suggests we’ve been using simplistic calculations that have overestimated the increase in drought globally over the last 60 years in response to greenhouse warming. Scientists typically use the Palmer Drought Severity Index, a bit a statistical black box that bases its drought estimate on …
Continue reading ‘Some good news today on climate change: less drought than we thought’ »
When the federal government and the seven US states that share the Colorado River signed their 2007 “Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and the Coordinated Operations for Lake Powell and Lake Mead,” the final Record of Decision (pdf) included several chunks of legalese to the effect that the deal, while binding on the US …
Continue reading ‘How the US-Mexico Colorado shortage/surplus sharing deal works’ »
Just the blog equivalent of thinking out loud here. It’s not that this data was surprising to me, so much as that I wasn’t sure what to expect. Four cities in the western United States with some similar characteristics – arid climate, water supply challenges, growing populations. Each of the four is the dominant population …
Continue reading ‘nota bene: population growth in the West’s urban archipelago*’ »
A small but interesting water law/politics/policy case is emerging in northern New Mexico, involving a request by a Sangre de Cristo mountains ski area to use more water for its snow-making equipment. This is the sort of case that hinges on the withdrawal/consumption distinction – how much water a user withdraws from the system, versus …
Continue reading ‘Water transfers: the view from downstream’ »
If you needed another prod to sign up as a CoCoRaHSÂ weather observer, now you can get PRISM data for your own neighborhood. I’ve got 13 years of precip data for my house, first as part of the Albuquerque National Weather Service’s CityNet program, and now as a CoCoRaHS observer. But 13 years is too short …
Continue reading ‘Heineman-Fleck house monthly climate report, now with new improved PRISM data’ »
There’s a tendency, when confronted with water problems, to try to specify solutions: If only we’d junk those golf courses and stop watering our damn lawns so much! Why are we wasting our precious water growing alfalfa in the desert! We must reduce exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta! Water markets! In a post last …
I’ve always known, in very general terms, that the tumbleweed is an interloper. But the story is better than I could possibly have hoped. From Tim Egan’s The Worst Hard Time (a book I’m just catching up with and wondering what took me so long): [W]hen they boarded ships for America, the Germans from Russia …
Continue reading ‘Russian thistle and the American heartland’ »
Water is at the core of a compelling human drama. Or perhaps dramas (plural). Yet the core issues, where the drama lies, are maddeningly difficult to, if I may share a personal journalist neologism, “storyize”. Cynthia Barnett, my favorite water writer, explains in the Los Angeles Times: But we can’t see dried-out aquifers the way …
Kudos to Chris Austin, who was out ahead of everyone else earlier this week in laying out the details of the pending US-Mexico Colorado River water deal. I encourage you to head over to Chris’s blog for more on the deal, which was first presented last Monday to the board of the Metropolitan Water District …