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 …
Henry Brean observes that Hoover Dam’s ability to generate electricity is down 20 percent with low lake levels, a reminder of the tight integration of water and power questions along the Colorado River. The history of the big dams on the Colorado River, and the question of who gets their water, is inextricably linked with questions …
Daniel Collins (via haiku!) notes the important point that water folks are increasingly raising about climate change: it’s not just whether rainfall goes up or down. Increased evaporation and transpiration as the climate warms is the critical water supply variable. From Cai and others in GRL – since 1950, nearly half the reduction in soil …
A couple of months ago, Coco raised a great question when I was riffing about the amusing implications of shipping lettuce from the Imperial Valley to Albuquerque so I could feed it to ants: Not enough water to grow lettuce in the Middle Rio Grande? Maybe someday. Depends. Someday, not enough cheap oil for schlepping …
Continue reading ‘In the long emergency, how far will we ship our lettuce?’ »
By my calculation, the cost of NASA’s recently discovered moon water is $1,029,690,515,640 per acre foot.
The Book Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. So here’s the book. Box arrived today. I’d wrestled with its words and pictures separately, seen the proofs, but there’s something about holding it in my hands…. Available for pre-order on Amazon (click the link in the right-hand rail) if you’ve got middle-school aged kids in your orbit who …
A lack of precision in the way I worded a post last week on reservoir levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead seems to have led to some confusion. I was writing about the rising levels in Lake Powell as Lake Mead was dropping, and suggested this was the result of a management decision rather …
Continue reading ‘A Clarification on the Mead-Powell Data’ »
Here’s a question for the western water wonks in the audience. During a time of unprecedented population growth in the west, we just went through the driest 10-year stretch on the Colorado since record-keeping began. And no one had their water turned off. What does this say about the systems we have in place to …
Continue reading ‘On the Colorado, Are We Doing Better Than I Thought?’ »
Here in the Albuquerque metro area, there’s been a great deal of discussion about desalination of waster from deep brackish aquifers to provide new sources of supply. A lot of talk. But not much action, other than an interesting pilot-scale project now underway west of the community of Rio Rancho. The area is growing rapidly, …
Wayne Bossert is amused at the wailing emanating from California about the notion that someone should start keeping track of the water they pump from the ground: For the Californians in the audience, I’d like to offer that Kansas has been monitoring water use since the mid 1970s, took significant strides to improve that monitoring …