In southern California, the Metropolitan Water District is cranking up the rate meter, squeezed in the conservation v. cost vice: As more people conserve water, MWD sells less water, and that means revenues go down. But MWD’s costs of delivering that water remain essentially the same: Thus, prices go up.
I had to laugh when I looked at today’s long-lead precipitation forecasts from the Climate Prediction Center. Those little splotches of color are forecasts. All that white is what the forecasters call “equal chances”, which basically means they have no idea other than historical climatology what might happen. In other words, it could be wet, …
We’ve got a fascinating border water fight going on between Mexico and irrigators in the United States over water from the Rio Grande right now. But rather than the usual issue – who gets how much – this one’s over when the water is used. Under US-Mexico treaty, Mexican irrigators are entitled to a set …
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From the morning paper, the latest on efforts to corral jet fuel that leaked from Kirtland Air Force Base and is now spreading through Albuquerque groundwater: Kirtland Air Force Base’s efforts to determine the extent of jet fuel groundwater contamination are “inadequate,” according to the New Mexico Environment Department, which is demanding new, deeper monitoring …
Via Chris Brooks, an interesting discussion of legislation in Arizona that appears aimed at making it harder to leave water in rivers for its own sake: The motivation for preventing the growth of instream flow rights appears to stem from the fact that they have become, in practice, more powerful than they appear on paper. …
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Usually rivers get bigger and bigger as you go farther downstream. But the Colorado just keeps getting smaller. That’s Will Stauffer-Norris in the Aspen Times talking about the trip he and Zak Podmore made down the Colorado River, from end to end. In this case, a dusty, had-to-walk kind of end. It’s a a great line …
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Writing in the Sacramento Bee, Newsha Ajami of the Pacific Institute and groundwater guru John Bredehoeft ask, in relation to the proposed Cadiz aquifer pump-and-sell project in the Mojave Desert, who owns the groundwater? The company plans to extract 2.5 million acre-feet of the water, a public good, over the next 50 years and sell it back …
In an email last week, Kevin Werner at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center called March 2012 “one of the warmest and driest on record in the Upper Colorado Basin.” The Forecast Center’s April 1 numbers are the ones you can start taking to the bank, with the bulk of the snow accumulation season behind …
If Kelly Redmond had a nickel for every time I’ve quoted his definition of drought, he’s have enough money for lunch today: Wet years have a way of covering up a multitude of water management sins. Drought exposes them for all to see. Back in the 1990s, we had all the same underlying water management …
The ubiquitous Connie Woodhouse (one of the stars of The Tree Rings’ Tale) has been working with a team using tree rings to reconstruct the flow of the Indus River: Dr. Woodhouse did the reconstruction of the water flow level in River Colorado in the US. She is working on a similar project for River …