I’m told that twice in the last few decades enough water spilled past the Colorado River’s dams to wet the old Colorado River Delta and bring back the life – once during the great El Niño season of 1983, when there was so much water in the system that we almost lost Glen Canyon Dam, …
China’s latest 10-year plan, which came out in January, includes what seems to me like a staggeringly large investment in trying to better manage its water: The country will invest 4 trillion yuan ($608 billion) into projects during the next decade to improve water conservation, Chen Xiwen, director of the office for the Communist Party …
Chris Brooks writes about the tension in Tucson between the use of sewage effluent for environmental flows and other uses. Tucson is in a very different situation from Albuquerque, where the effluent from Albuquerque’s sewage treatment plan is returned to a flowing Rio Grande, and is accounted as “return flows”, used to offset Albuquerque’s water …
Via the satellite data analysis folks at Chelys, a view of what used to be called the “Colorado River delta”, which is now one of the great winter vegetable growing regions of North America. That’s the Salton Sea top left, the Imperial Valley and Calexico farming regions in the center, and the Gila and Colorado …
If all goes well weather wise over the next six weeks, the US Bureau of Reclamation will release a substantial slug of extra water in 2011 to help refill Lake Mead. Thanks to a decent snow pack, there is currently a 71 percent chance that the big reservoirs on the Colorado, Mead and Powell, will …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Yo, Vegas – Bonus Water on the Way!’ »
A new Stockholm Environmental Institute analysis of water supply and demand in the Southwestern United States suggests we’re screwed. In the U.S. Southwest – Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah – there is less rain and snowfall each year than the amount of water used in the region. Today that shortfall is made up …
So what if we pump California’s Central Valley aquifers to empty? On The Public Record twiddles on the back of an envelope: Before this report, my rough feel was that about one million acres of irrigated lands in CA are supported by unsustainable groundwater withdrawals. If overdraft is 10 MAF/year in the Central Valley, it …
Continue reading ‘On the implications of pumping California dry’ »
Forecast flow on the Colorado River as a whole and major tributaries is down. I was otherwise occupied yesterday and missed the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’s monthly briefing, but Kevin Werner has posted his slides. Some high points: January, as you can see from the accompanying image, was remarkably dry across the basin, a …
It’s interesting to see Aaron Tilton’s approach to selling Utah officials on his proposed Green River nuclear power plant proposal’s economic use of water: “Water use in a nuclear power plant is very economic,” Tilton said, calculating the power’s dollar output at $127,569 per million gallons, to agriculture’s $5,080. “The benefits are real in terms …
Continue reading ‘Nuke Plant Developer Makes Water Economics Pitch’ »
Anne Jefferson has a look at last year’s Pakistan flooding that explores the intriguing question of how you get people to listen to forecasts. It turns out that they had forecasts in enough time to take action to reduce risk, but the forecasts were apparently ignored: So the Pakistani government did forecast the flood – at …