Water Quote
“Water is the classic common property resource. No one really owns the problem. Therefore, no one really owns the solution.” – Ban Ki-moon, quoted in Grafton et al.
Archive of posts filed under the water category.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: On Water and Institutional Structures
Saturday’s post about Phoenix and the need for proper institutional structures to sort out the West’s water problems was really a bit of shadowboxing with a piece I was working on for today’s paper about New Mexico (sub. ad req.) It’s about an ongoing argument here about a proposed water rights agreement between our Interstate …
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Water in the Desert: Moving Flash Floods
We had a nice line of thundershowers move across Albuquerque this afternoon. After dinner, Lissa and I headed to the north end of town to view the results. The metro area’s North Diversion Channel drains roughly 100 square miles of city, and flood control engineers tell me it’s a relatively unusual terrain for a major …
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Phoenix and water – what’s plan B?
James Lawrence Powell concludes his otherwise excellent western water history Dead Pool with an apocalyptic vision of the abandonment of Phoenix, “a Grapes of Wrath-like exodus in reverse” as drought saps the Arizona city of its last reserves of water. It’s a vision I don’t buy (hence my “otherwise excellent” tag), because we won’t abandon …
River Beat: Western Precip Update
The question of how much it rained or snowed is an important one in water management, but answering it is not trivial. The answer depends on a mix of remote sensing data, radar and rain gages (often data collected by volunteers). I got a helpful note yesterday from Jeff Lukas about a western precipitation map I …
California’s Early Snowmelt
One of the less appreciated effects of warming temperatures on water supply is the shift in the timing of runoff. Warming springs mean earlier melt. This is as much an infrastructure problem as it is an overall water volume problem, because the dams and ditches built to manage water during the 20th century were based …
Is desal one lesson of Australia’s “big dry”?
At April’s “Implications of Lower Lake Levels” symposium, Brad Udall talked about the importance of the Australian example for the western United States. From 2000 to 2010, Udall said, parts of Australia experienced 40 to 50 percent reductions in river flow, which said has profoundly changed societal discussions about water. Australia’s “big dry” may be …
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River Beat: Some Good News
Update: I’ve added a post with a better seasonal precip map than the one below: ***** As we close in on the end of the current water year, the US Bureau of Reclamation has reported what passes for good news these days on the Colorado River. This month’s forecast for year-end storage levels in Lake …
Why David Appell Might Quit Reporting on Climate
David Appell, the science journalist whose work more than anyone else’s got me thinking hard about the implications of climate change and its relationship to my journalism, spewed some frustration last week that resonated. It doesn’t quoteblock well, go read the whole thing, but in a nutshell he argues that there’s not much point for …
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River Beat: Hoover Dam Back in the Day
From the US Bureau of Reclamation’s photo archive, Hoover Dam seen from the upstream side, circa 1935: