Paul Miller and Tom Piechota have assembled a new set of data suggesting a decline in precipitation in the West, and more particularly in the basin that feeds the Colorado River. For this work, they looked at SNOTEL stations, the network of snow measurement sites run by NRCS that feed data into streamflow forecasts. For …
Shaun McKinnon has some numbers on this year’s Arizona runoff, and they aren’t pretty: La Niña did a number on runoff down the Salt and Verde rivers this year — a low number, according to Salt River Project, which has released the final report on winter’s water yield. For the 2011 runoff season, the two …
update: A previous version of this post had what I though was a picture of Carl Rasch. Upon inquiry, I think it was a black-and-white picture of some other old dude with a great mustache. In answer to a question that came up in conversation on Twitter today, herewith an abbreviated version of the story …
Continue reading ‘Who Was Carl Rasch? The lawyer behind the Winters Doctrine’ »
Yesterday’s post about recurring suggestion that we build giant water infrastructure was premised in part on this year’s extremely wet year on the Missouri-Mississippi system, the “Why not build a big pipe from there to the desert” argument. As I mention, I hear this idea a lot, but especially this year, when it seems like …
Continue reading ‘You can’t size your infrastructure for the outliers’ »
Nearly every time I write a newspaper story about water, and without fail every time I give a talk, I get a question about why we don’t just build a big canal from some wet place and bring the water here to the desert southwest. It just seems so crazy to me – so over-the-top-engineering-costly-we-don’t-do-that-stuff-any-more …
Continue reading ‘Drought? But it’s flooding on the Mississippi!’ »
I tried my best while I was out riding this morning to get a picture that shows the strange discomfort flowing past in the Rio Grande and the irrigation ditches that flank the river as it passes through town. Need words to help – the water at this spot, on one of the ditches in …
For grins, I just checked the latest climate data for Baton Rouge, which is in the grip of a fierce drought. July’s been a decent month for them. Still below normal, but better than it has been. From July 12-14, they got 2.84 inches of rain. It’s the last day of the month, so I …
Ever surprising. Although increased irrigation efficiency is one of the most widely promoted solutions to increased water demand, its actual effects on the water balance are complex and even paradoxical. The cost to farmers of delivered irrigation water is minimal, meaning that there is little benefit from installing expensive water-conservation technology in terms of reducing …
Is it legal in New Mexico to catch the rain that falls on my roof and put it in a barrel for later use? Kinda. Sorta. Maybe? I love this question, which I’ve written about in the newspaper (sub/ad req) in the past, and which came up last week when I was talking to the …
In this epic dry year, we’ve heard a lot of “worst since the Dust Bowl” comparisons. I’ve been arguing that it’s a bogus comparison – one horribly dry year against a decadal scale phenomenon. But there’s a second reason, nicely captured by Kevin Welch today in the Amarillo Globe-News: Farming practices imported from the Midwest …