FYI all, I’ve deleted the post with the soil moisture map. It was dated 2020, not this year. That’s what get for enthusiastically curling up in my comfy chair with my new laptop and blogging while still on first cup of coffee.
One of the conceptual riddles Bob Berrens and I are working through in the new book we’re pursuing on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande, and the work surrounding it, is the ecosystem goods and services across our valley floor provided by the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s web of irrigation ditches. Where once we had …
Continue reading ‘On the ecosystem benefits of irrigation systems’ »
I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time the last few weeks pointing and clicking on the new OpenET project’s “data explorer”. Using satellite data and magical algorithms, OpenET allows me to look at an arbitrary bit of land and retrieve an estimate of the amount of “evapotranspiration” – essentially outdoor water use – for …
Per Dan McKay and Theresa Davis at the Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico State Engineer John D’Antonio is stepping down. In doing so, he was sharply critical of New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s decision to not ask the New Mexico legislature for increased funding for his depleted department despite booming state revenue: [H]e cited a …
I’m heading to Phoenix tomorrow (Wed. Nov. 10) to appear on what I hope will be a useful PBS Newshour live event: The Colorado River runs nearly fifteen hundred miles, winding through seven states and Mexico. It supplies drinking water to nearly 40 million people, irrigates nearly 4 million acres of farmland and attracts millions …
Continue reading ‘Watch Live: Tipping Point – The Colorado River Basin’ »
With the ink barely dry on the ill-named Colorado River “Drought Contingency Plan”, the Lower Basin states (Nevada, Arizona, and California) are already cooking up a Plan C for even deeper reductions. Joanna Allhands at the Arizona Republic has a nice look at what we know about the details: Arizona, California and Nevada are moving …
Continue reading ‘Scaling back, even more, in the Lower Colorado River Basin’ »
Peña Blanca, NM – The Cochiti Main, winding through the village of Peña Blanca, was still flowing Saturday morning with some of the last of this year’s irrigation water destined for farms to the south. I’m a bit jammed up in my effort to return to writing (see below for the “some personal news” portion …
Heather Sackett did a good story this week on new data Brad Udall has been sharing that geographically parses the declines in streamflow across the Colorado River Basin. For folks like us down here in New Mexico, dependent on the San Juan as a critical source of supply, the news is not good: This month, …
By Eric Kuhn The latest Bureau of Reclamation monthly Colorado River modeling runs show an even bigger drop over the next year in Lake Powell’s elevation that previously projected. But this is not an example of bad news getting worse. Instead, a change toward a drier baseline hydrology more accurately reflects the drying of the …
One of the central questions dimly visible in the early discussions around the upcoming renegotiation of the Colorado River’s water operations and allocations rules is the question of how bad a “worst case” scenario should be considered. This is crucial, because it constrains what sort of questions must then be confronted. The lower the future …