From the work blog, a quick look at how the Storms of the Decade have been playing out in terms of western snowpack. In short: it’s raining like hell where all the people live, but the upper Colorado Basin, which feeds Lake Powell, has been pretty much left out with the exception of a blast …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Storms, the Snowpack’ »
I grew up in Upland, in the suburbs east of Los Angeles, in the foothills beneath Cucamonga Peak. Southern California’s storms this week have been a pleasant reminder of my childhood. A little cross referencing of family memory and old weather records pinned it down to January of 1969. It was my sister Lisa’s 12th …
The current situation in Venezuela, with drought leading to a shortage of hydropower, is a great example of a problem with the word “drought.” A reminder of Kelly Redmond’s handy definition: Most concepts of drought involve a water balance. This implies that both supply and demand must be considered, as well as the question of …
Continue reading ‘Is Venezuela Having a Demand-Side Drought?’ »
Rio Grande, Alameda New Mexico, Jan. 17, 2010 Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Like much about New Mexico, the Rio Grande is modest, but it has its charms. The bike is a great tool for the study of geography, because it allows you to cover sufficient ground to make generalizations, but at a sufficiently slow speed …
Here in the southwestern United States, we’re gearing up for a big blast of El Nino weather, with some areas in California expecting a pounding. But as we desert dwellers dig through closets looking for our underused umbrellas, it’s worth remembering how dry it’s been. That’s percent of normal precip since Oct. 1, courtesy NOAA:
The folks at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation have crunched the numbers on how the latest 2010 Colorado River runoff forecast will affect the river’s major storage reservoirs, and the news is not good for Lake Mead. At this point, according to the Bureau of Reclamation, there is just a one in five chance that …
Continue reading ‘Chances of Extra Water for Mead Diminish’ »
Tony Davis reports in this morning’s Arizona Daily Star that the Central Arizona Project could see a shortage in its Colorado River allocation by 2012: For decades, most water experts have expected the Central Arizona Project to eventually run short, as population growth outstripped the supply of the Colorado River that long ago was over-allocated …
Continue reading ‘Arizona Could See Colorado Shortage by 2012’ »
The January Colorado River forecast for 2009-10, out last Friday, is the lowest at this point in the year since 2002-03: The range of uncertainty right now is enormous. In an average year, about 8 million acre feet flows into Lake Powell in the April-July period, which is the peak of the runoff season. This …
Tramway (Not So) Wetlands Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. January’s a time of quiet and anticipation. What water there is in our rivers is mostly what they call “base flow”, which is really just the surface manifestation of groundwater leaking into the river channel. Or they’re just dry. The runoff to come is frozen in the …
About five seconds with the google is enough to make one question the old alleged Twain chestnut: “Whiskey’s for drinking, water’s for fighting about.” Is that too much to ask, Mark Strassman? Especially given how not only factually wrong but conceptually misleading the reference is? Whiskey, yes, but water is frequently not for fighting about, …