Tony Davis had a great story in the Daily Star over the weekend on the allure of desalination of ocean water as Arizona struggles with shrinking Colorado River supplies. Tony’s excellent work on this question susses out the problems: ocean desal is costly, like really costly ocean desal is energy intensive, like really energy intensive …
Continue reading ‘Desalination, Arizona, and magical thinking’ »
By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck Herbert Hoover’s words a century ago were chosen with care. Might it be possible, he wondered, for the state officials gathered around him that day “to agree upon a compact between the seven states of the Colorado Basin, providing for an equitable division of the water supply of the …
Continue reading ‘A century ago, Colorado River Compact negotiations begin’ »
A friend shared this, from the Sandia Lab News, circa 1955: New Dyke Will Give Salton Sea Test Base Protection Against Rapidly Rising Water The steadily rising water level of the Salton Sea in southern California is presenting a problem for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in seeking to safeguard test facilities operated by Sandia …
Continue reading ‘Back in the days when the Salton Sea was rising’ »
Yes. But that’s not stopping me! The Jan. 1 forecasts, courtesy of Angus Goodbody of the NRCS, for flows at Otowi (the head of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley) and San Marcial (the tail) are for “normal” flows, where “normal” is defined now by the median of flows from 1991-2020. The reason it’s definitely …
Continue reading ‘Is it too early to be optimistic about this year’s Rio Grande flow?’ »
My newest hobby – running down the water story for random patches of Albuquerque. From Sunday’s bike ride, a fallowed vineyard, a bit more than an acre in size. It’s at the base of the sand hills on the east side of the Rio Grande Valley, just down the hill from a Ford dealer. Per …
Lissa, an able book research field assistant (by which I mean she happily listens to my yammering, asks the best questions, and indulges the vital forays into the field to see stuff), joined me on a drive yesterday afternoon to the Barelas Bridge, one of seven Rio Grande crossings in the river’s Albuquerque reach. There’s …
In the wake of a Colorado River Water Users Association meeting that was by turns exuberant (We got to see one another for the first time since the Before Times!) and stark (The reservoirs are nearly empty!), Anne Castle and I have a new paper out this week in a special issue of the journal …
The caption of the picture above is a bit of a fib, but it was true when I wrote it. I had to click through on the picture’s geotag to figure out that it was taken where the Sausal Drain connects to the Jaral Lateral near Belen in Valencia County, New Mexico. Not exactly lost, …
We’re entering the end-of-year water accounting phase of the Rio Grande hydrograph in central New Mexico, with big flows coming out of the Rio Chama, the largest tributary in this stretch of our “big” river. As I’ve written before, relatively higher December flows are a weird artifact of water management rules, which do accounting on …
Continue reading ‘Big flows on central New Mexico Rio Grande as feds move water’ »
Daniel Rothberg yesterday published a very helpful Q and A with John Entsminger of the Southern Nevada Water Authority that gets to the heart of one of the really important discussions now underway in the Colorado River Basin: Rothberg: You mentioned not that long ago, testifying in Congress, that “the river community is far from …