From yesterday’s newspaper, a slightly sheepish ode to my fascination with really, really big water engineering projects (sub/ad req.): From the time I first toured Hoover Dam as a kid — “enough concrete to pave a strip 16 feet wide and 8 inches thick from San Francisco to New York,” as the Bureau of Reclamation …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Engineering Marvels’ »
The first review of my book is in, and it’s a good one (albeit less than 140 characters long): great for us non-youths too. Highly recommended. The Tree Rings’ Tale, available now.
If we can all avert our eyes for a moment from the CRU emails, the inexorable momentum of climate science hurtles down the track with a new paper in today’s Science using paleo records to suggest (among many interesting things) that a warming world is, for the southwestern US, a drier world. Mike Mann and …
Continue reading ‘Climate Change and Southwestern Drought’ »
It’s early days yet in terms of a forecast for 2009-10 flow on the Colorado River. Because it depends on the amount of snow that falls on the Colorado Basin’s mountains, there is great uncertainty this early in the year. But the map below can give us some hint about the probabilities: What you can …
When I was a little kid, I thought John Wesley Powell was the coolest, the one-armed adventurer daring the unknown as he ran the rapids of the Grand Canyon – the “Great Unknown” – for the first time. Standing on the Grand Canyon’s south rim, I would stare down at those little glimpses you get …
Given the sturm und drang over Lake Mead’s dropping levels and their implications for the water future of Las Vegas, the preliminary numbers in the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s 2010 Annual Operating Plan are worthy of note. The latest posted version of the plan is marked “final draft”, but I’m told it’s essentially complete, and …
Continue reading ‘Will Mead Get an Extra Shot Of Water in 2010?’ »
It’s worth noting that the current conversation about Atlanta’s water future has not arisen because of questions about sustainability of water supplies for the various users in Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Basin. It’s instead the result of a legal issue: Atlanta’s primary source of supply, Lake Lanier, was never authorized by Congress to serve as a water …
Continue reading ‘Atlanta’s Remarkable Water Conversation’ »
Pasadena, CA, blogger Wayne Lusvardi, who sometimes writes about that city’s water problems, had a post recently suggesting that global warming might lead to increased flows in the Colorado River. This would, of course, be excellent news for Pasadena and others who use Colorado River water (thought it does conflict with some of the literature …
Continue reading ‘Could Global Warming Be Good for Colorado River Flows?’ »
Drought conditions are getting remarkably bad in our neighbor to the west (that would be Arizona): That’s from this week’s Drought Monitor.
This weekend, I ran across a terrific piece Matt Jenkins wrote for High Country News back in 2005 about Phoenix’s water problems. It holds up well: much of the core issues he’s describing are still problems, especially the quirky loopholes in the water laws that were intended to ensure groundwater sustainability. But there’s a new …