Which spill to cover? Some environmental journalism tradecraft here. There is a nagging problem for reporters who cover contamination problems. As a society, we spill nasty shit all the time, in all sorts of places, from the sheen of oil and lead wheel weight residues on our streets to the nitrates beneath dairies to the …
I took a quick dash out to see the Rio Grande yesterday at lunch. It’s easy to sit in my office and call and surf and think about water in the abstract, but it’s important to go out and see it as often as I can. It’ s been up and down a bit over …
One of my favorite stories of early western water science is the clever way geologist G.K. Gilbert, in the 19th century, used the rise and fall of the Great Salt Lake as a proxy for decadal-scale climate variability. Here’s how I told the story in my book: The lake has no outlent, and so the only …
Continue reading ‘G.K. Gilbert and the changing Great Salt Lake’ »
Easy answer to the question asked in the title of this post, right? The last decade is the driest 10-year stretch since record keeping began on the Colorado River. Of course Lake Mead has dropped because of “drought”, right? No. During that entire time, thanks to upstream storage and the fact that Upper Basin consumption …
Update: Tom Pagano points out in the comments, I think correctly, that I’m incorrectly interpreting the data because the most recent data points cover a shorter period of time. So take this with a grain of salt…. ******* At the risk of overanalyzing a single short term data point, the weekly model runs from the …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Colorado River Forecasts Continue to Drop’ »
Joyce Lobeck reports on yesterday’s festivities in Yuma to mark next week’s start of the Yuma Desalting Plant test run: On Monday, the desalting plant will be started up for a yearlong demonstration run that will produce about 29,000 acre-feet of desalinated water. That means 29,000 acre-feet of water – enough to serve 116,000 people …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Yuma Desalting Plant Dedication’ »
The Bureau of Reclamation’s Yuma Desalting Plant is scheduled to begin its operational test phase next week. In preparation, a U.S.-Mexican team is ramping up its monitoring efforts at the Cienega de Santa Clara, an accidental wetland in what was once the Colorado River delta. The Cienega is the inadvertent product of U.S. ag drainage …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Monitoring the Cienega de Santa Clara’ »
There’s a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation graph making the rounds that captures the core issue going forward on the Colorado River Basin. Colorado River Basin Supply and Demand, courtesy USBR I first noticed it in Jennifer Pitt’s congressional testimony in early April. At the “Implications of Lower Lake Levels” symposium I just attended in Las Vegas, …
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The Cienega de Santa Clara, the one remaining major wetland in the Colorado River Delta, is not being drained as a result of Mexico’s 7.2 magnitude earthquake, according to Karl Flessa, the University of Arizona researcher who is part of a team monitoring the ecosystem. The area was hit hard by the earthquake. The San …
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LAS VEGAS, NEV – Walking up from our hotel to the strip in search of a place to eat last night, battered by neon and flashing lights, my dinner companion commented ruefully on how distant we were from nature. I suppose you could say that in the middle of any city, but in Las Vegas …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert, Las Vegas edition II’ »