Corey Pieper, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Texas, linked this evening to some excellent (if grim) maps showing what it would take to bring Texas, New Mexico and the rest of the southern tier of states out of drought. The first is the percent of normal precipitation required over the winter to end drought: …
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From the morning paper, a riff on getting acquainted with our river: The question of what we know about our river, and how we care for it, has been on my mind since I finished reading Cynthia Barnett’s new book, “Blue Revolution.” Barnett, a Florida journalist, writes about the need for a water ethic. She …
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Via Doug Obegi at NRDC’s San Francisco office, more evidence today of the interconnection of water management across the western United States. Obegi, in a post outlining the history of diversions from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, pointed out the way water allotments to the Westlands Water District in the San Joaquin Valley decreased as the …
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In the western United States, water use and water rights questions associated with Native American communities are a major factor in the region’s future. Under federal law, these communities are entitled to substantial but often unquantified amounts of water. Planning for the future often gets tangled up in these questions. For example: Not all tribes …
Given the time scales associated with climate change and societal response, it seems perhaps best to wait to consume the new IPCC Special Report Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) until it’s actually done. This seems especially true given its stated purpose: The assessment concerns the interaction of climatic, environmental, and human …
Back in the 1950s, the Colorado River, at least a bit of it, used to regularly reach the “Southern International Boundary” – the river bed near San Luis where it stops being the US-Mexico border and travels solely in Mexico. Even during the driest bits, when Lake Mead was dropping during the late ’50s, at …
In his richly detailed The Fall and Rise of the Wetlands of California’s Great Central Valley, Philip Garone explains a bit about the origin of wildlife refuges that I never knew: During the early decades of the twentieth century, much of the Sacramento Valley was converted to profitable rice production. However, because the valley’s natural …
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I’m thinkin’ you’ll want to head out to your favorite local bookstore and buy Bill deBuys’ A Great Aridness. It’s full of stuff like this, on the dry winter of 2001-02, when a bear came out of hibernation early because it was so warm and ransacked deBuys’ yard in search of something to eat: That …
Because it’s hard to resist the word “megadrought” – or, frankly, the concept: Tree rings from the headwaters of the Rio Grande show a 50-year drought from 122 to 172 AD, suggesting that “megadroughts” may be a recurring feature of the region’s climate, according to new research by a University of Arizona team. Scientists have …
Thrown on driveways this morning, my effort to explain why I think the endangered species act process, as it relates to the silver minnow on the Rio Grande, is broken: If you believe those who argue we are overusing water in the Middle Rio Grande Valley and headed for a crash (and there’s good data …
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