I’ve a chance to get out to California later this year and do some reporting on water issues, so I’ve been doing some reading, trying to get a better feel for where to focus my attention. This is in part driven by my belief that the West’s water issues have become inextricably linked, and to …
Continue reading ‘California Water Governance: Some Questions’ »
I’ve been spending a lot of my work days of late in a blow-by-blow rundown of the growing drought conditions in New Mexico: An already dismal forecast for spring runoff in New Mexico’s rivers has gotten worse, after a dry, windy March sapped the state’s snowpack. Spring and summer flow on the Rio Grande into …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert – low flows on the Rio Grande’ »
From the US Bureau of Reclamation’s April 24-month Colorado River operations plan (pdf): The April 24-Month Study with an annual release volume from Glen Canyon Dam of 8.23 maf projects a Lake Powell end of water year elevation of 3,662.63 feet. Based on this projected condition and consistent with the provision in Section 6.B.3 of the …
Sometimes a comparison can be useful.
Watching them bring water to the 300-year-old Duranes irrigation ditch.
Chris Brooks has a post on proposed legislation in Arizona that would have created incentives for large-scale rainwater harvesting and groundwater recharge. The idea was to give people water rights to the resulting water stored in the aquifer. As Chris notes, there are a couple of problems. First, some of the rainwater you harvest and …
Digging through some old files, I ran across this fascinating discussion of climate adaptation in a 2009 Las Vegas Sun interview with Pat Mulroy, head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority: [W]here we have finally begun to look at how to mitigate climate change and what we have to do in terms of changing our …
Also from this morning’s paper, a story documenting Albuquerque’s 60th consecutive day without measurable precipitation. We’ve got an outside chance of breaking the streak this evening, and then again mid-week. But the forecasts are basically bleak. But the real import was tucked in near the end of the story (sub/ad req): Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau …
Continue reading ‘Something Else I Wrote Elsewhere: Supplementing the River’ »
From the Sunday Journal, a look at two proposals to pump and pipe water from rural New Mexico to the state’s rapidly developing Rio Grande corridor (sub/ad req): Ray Pittman pulled his 1994 F-150 pickup to the top of a thinly wooded hill, a short walk from the water tank he built back in 1999 …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Moving Water, New Mexico Style’ »