Another Water Blog
Shaun McKinnon over at the Arizona Republic
Archive of posts filed under the water category.
More Bad News From Down Under
The drought thing’s back in the news: Scarce winter rain across much of drought-parched Australia led a key government forecaster Tuesday to slash its harvest predictions for wheat and barley. The wheat harvest, one of Australia’s major agricultural exports, was estimated at 15.5 million metric tons (17 million U.S. tons), down 31 percent from the …
Wet Water vs. Paper Water
Staci Matlock at the Santa Fe New Mexican wrote a good primer over the weekend about the difference between water rights and actual water here in New Mexico: Real water: That’s wet water, the stuff one needs for drinking, washing clothes, growing food, building houses and cooling power plants. Paper water: The piece of paper …
Drought Map Mashup
Some smart person at NOAA’s climate prediction center has done a lovely mashup of two maps I regularly look at to track drought: the weekly drought monitor and the USGS streamflow map.
Water in the Desert: Arizona Road Trip Edition
Ocotillo Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Lissa and I just back from a lovely weeks’ trip around Arizona. The main purpose was a visit to the University of Arizona and environs in Tucson for a project we’re working on. We spent a delightful day at the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research, made a pilgrimage to Tumamoc …
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“permanent drought”
What happens when what used to be abnormally dry becomes the new normal? Drought will become a redundant term as Australia plans for a permanently drier future, according to the nation’s urban water industries chief. And climate experts yesterday predicted the present drought would continue, signalling a cruel summer for farmers and sparking fears of …
Water in the Desert: Embudo Edition
Embudo Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Driving up to Taos last weekend to see art, Lissa and I stopped at Embudo in the Rio Grande Gorge to see the oldest continuously operated stream gage in the United States. The river was running about 450 cfs while we were there – not a lot of water, but …
Dry Down the River
This week’s drought tour of America takes us to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where they just completed the driest August on record. It is an old river town, with its downtown opening onto a bend in the Mississippi River. For those interested in Western lore, it’s where John Wesley Powell spent a summer early in his …
Water in the San Luis Valley
Staci Matlock has a nice story in the New Mexican about water problems in the San Luis Valley, on the upper Rio Grande in Colorado: Until five years ago, most people thought water in the upper one-third of the San Luis Valley was hydrologically disconnected from the river. It was called a closed basin — …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
On water and growth: We live in the fastest growing part of the country. It is also the driest. We don’t seem to be doing a very good job of linking those two issues, according to experts gathered for a two-day symposium on water and growth. “We don’t adequately combine planning for growth and planning …