The question of how much water we’ll need in the Southwest going forward is dominated by uncertainty over what future population growth will look like. And I confess that I’ve got no earthly idea how to think well about this question. Consider Phoenix. In his new ebook The Gated City, Ryan Avent argues that Phoenix …
For the current water year, Oct. 1, 2010, through the end of August, I’ve had 4.39 inches (11.15 cm) of rain at my house in Albuquerque’s near northeast heights. That’s 51 percent of the mean going back to the 1999-2000 water year. Just one of the months, December, was above my long term mean, and …
Climate change and the resulting changes in rivers flows pose significant problems for transboundary water management agreements. But a new paper by Heather Cooley and Peter Gleick at the Pacific Institute finds a hopeful model in recent tweaks adding flexibility in the face of drought to the “Law of the River” governing distribution of water …
Continue reading ‘The Law of the River as a model for dealing with the loss of stationarity’ »
I had a really scary dream this morning. My memory is vague, but I was somehow involved in making decisions about how to allocate the water in a big river among various users. But we didn’t have good data on how much water the river actually held. Terrifying.
ABQJournal video edition of the weekend post-fire flood flow explainer, with the remarkable Kerry Jones video of the torrent in Cochiti Canyon: (Thanks to Troy Simpson, Richard Pipes and Kerry Jones)
One of my new tricks when looking at western water problems is to pose the question: “What is the failure mode?” It’s clear that on many scales, both temporal and geographic, we’ve got supply-demand imbalances. It’s easy to point that out and call the system unsustainable, to point out that we’re headed for a crash. …
The results of a couple of trips north last week into the flood zone in the canyons below the watersheds burned by the Las Conchas fire (sub/ad req): In Cochiti Canyon, a New Mexico Environment Department team estimated the Aug. 21 flow that caused the first round of damage at Dixon’s at 12,000 cubic feet …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: on the power of moving water’ »
If you’ve driven the stretch of Interstate 40 across northern Arizona between Gallup and Holbrook, you’ve perhaps seen the signs for a place called Goodwater. If you’ve not, trust me – there’s not much good water around those parts. The story of human settlement in the region is the story of the struggle for good …
Jay Lund and colleagues have modeled a range of possible impacts of climate change on flood flows in California. From a nice summary on the UC Davis California WaterBlog: Warming generally worsened flood inflows into reservoirs. Even with less precipitation, warmer conditions often increased flood inflows to reservoirs. When more precipitation fell as rain, rather …
A river is not just in one place. It extends in time up and down its watershed. Last night, Daniel Porter at the Albuquerque National Weather Service office sent out an alert of possible flooding on Peralta Canyon, which enters the Rio Grande about 40 miles north of Albuquerque. Its watershed was burned in the …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert: blackwater edition’ »