With the 2009 “water year” just completed, it’s time to take stock. The decade just completed, 2000-2009, is the driest 10-year period in the Colorado River Basin in the record, according to preliminary data in the latest draft of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Annual Operating Plan, a compendium of past data on the …
I have to commend Bill Hume for his op-ed in yesterday’s Albuquerque Journal. (Really, I do have to. He agrees with me!) Clearly, municipal and state growth planning that includes a hard-nosed recognition of water realities is the only strategy for confronting the offset water tap-out. And, new sources of water or new technologies for …
Fascinating Greenwire story in today’s New York Times on a provision for statewide groundwater monitoring potentially sinking California’s massive water legislation deal: Then groundwater monitoring reappeared and slowed momentum in the chamber. A bill that would require statewide monitoring of water pumped from the ground — as opposed to more relaxed local control — was …
Continue reading ‘Groundwater Tiff Stalls California Water Deal’ »
Total storage in Lake Mead at the end of September (the end of the western “water year”) was lower than it’s been since they first filled it in the 1940s. But this is a bit more complicated than that stark statement might appear. If you click through to look at a larger version of the …
The Salton Sea is a fascinating case study in the cultural ambiguity of “nature”. Created in 1905 when the Colorado River found a hole in a poorly constructed irrigation intake and flooded low-lying California desert, the Sea has been sustained – sort of – by agricultural runoff. So it’s not at all “natural” by one …
Some accumulated links to recent water news: Lisa Pham reports in the New York Times on new water tech developing in Australia, where drought has forced a certain level of creativity the rest of us have had the luxury thus far to ignore. (Note that a lot of this gee-whiz stuff is high tech, rather …
Also from this morning’s paper, a brief report (business model, ad/sub yada) on yesterday’s Middle Rio Grande Water Assembly meeting. I tried to balance the progress made on water conservation with the grim message I’ve been pushing in my recent work on this regarding the supply-demand deficit in New Mexico’s heavily populated middle valley: Water …
More blathering from the morning paper, this the tale of the fascinating work of Blair Wolf (sub/ad yada yada) a University of New Mexico biologist who studies the water consumption of desert birds: The smaller a desert creature, the more water loss matters, and little birds like verdin are especially vulnerable, Wolf said. Sometimes, that …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere II: Birds, warming and the desert’ »
Shaun McKinnon has a must-read story for those interested in western water in today’s Arizona Republic about the discussion in his state about the future of agricultural and municipal water use: As Phoenix grew, the land available for farms shrank and water use shifted. As recently as 1965, 80 percent of the water delivered by …
I used the Los Angeles River’s famed concrete as a bit of a stalking horse in a piece I wrote earlier this week. But Albuquerque birdwriter Judy Liddell points out that the concrete is not all there is to the old water course: As it flows through central Los Angeles, it reverts to the concrete …