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 CoCoRaHS 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 …
From the morning paper, a look at the wet bits and the dry bits at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge during a drought, and the challenge of mimicking nature: Some years, like this one, drought comes to the refuge in a way that matches what we would have seen in a drought year …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Engineering nature at the Bosque del Apache’ »
I’m generally sympathetic to the notion that transboundary water conflicts are overrated, and that they often provide a framework for cooperation. Except when they don’t (from this week’s Economist): The decision by Laos to push ahead with the giant Xayaburi dam makes it the first of what could prove to be a cascade of 11 …
When beetles kill trees, it changes water chemistry for the folks downstream of the hammered watersheds. And not in a good way (DBP is “disinfection by-products”, study area is in Colorado): Results demonstrate higher total organic carbon concentrations along with significantly more DBPs at water-treatment facilities using mountain-pine-beetle-infested source waters when contrasted with those using water …
Continue reading ‘Beetle kill, watersheds and water quality’ »
Bruce Finley in the Denver Post tallies up another western city cutting municipal water use, demonstrating that, for city water users, this is a tractable problem: Water-saving efforts already have dropped metro Denver residents’ overall average daily usage to 85 gallons, down from 104 gallons in 2001. Only one city better than Denver in Finley’s …