From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: As northern Georgia suffers through a monumental drought and the toughest water restrictions ever imposed, Stone Mountain is using up to 38 gallons of water a minute — for 12 to 18 hours a day for the next month — to make snow. On the day Gov. Sonny Perdue took the …
Continue reading ‘I Guess This is One Way to Respond to Drought’ »
From today’s Judge Parker, it looks like Sophie’s on to something big: “A company in Nevada has been slowly buying agricultural property all over the West!” “So?” “They’re buying the property to gain access to the water underneath!” Smart girl. This sounds like trouble. (Hat tip Kelsey.)
Staci Matlock has a good story in this morning’s Santa Fe New Mexican outlining the regulatory dilemma facing New Mexico related to Sandoval County’s hunt for brackish water for desalination: This new, deep source of water poses a regulatory challenge to the state engineer, who is charged with overseeing New Mexico’s increasingly precious water resources. …
Continue reading ‘Inland Desalination: The Regulatory Side’ »
Rio Grande Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Looking south down the Rio Grande from the Paseo del Norte Bridge in Albuquerque Sunday, Sept. 23, 2007. That’s maybe 450 cubic feet per second of flow, which is getting down toward what they call “base flow“. That’s the minimum flow in a desert river, the point at which …
Hoover Dam – Small Version Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. From our trip to the New Mexico State Fair a week ago. It’s a scale model of Hoover Dam, the great monument to America’s confidence in its ability to tame the great Colorado River and make the desert bloom. I’ve always loved the triumphant architecture of …
Continue reading ‘Water in the Desert: Muscular Americana Edition’ »
Every state in the Western U.S., save Colorado, currently has below average reservoir storage.
Shaun McKinnon over at the Arizona Republic
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 …
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 …
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.