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 …
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 — …
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 …
Notes on a water meeting
Based on all the reporting I’ve been doing for the Albuquerque Journal, it seems to me that you could easily substitute “New Mexico” for “Colorado” in this story: The issue is critical in Western states such as Colorado, where even in wet years almost every river already is “over-appropriated,” with insufficient water to satisfy demand. …
I’ve written at some length (and with some enthusiasm) about Phil Mote’s work on declining western snowpack. Here’s an interesting counterpoint: We conclude that only about one third of the gages exhibit significant trends with time but over half of the gages tested show significant relationships with discharge. Therefore, runoff timing is more significantly correlated …
My colleague Sean Olson illustrates in this morning’s paper his grasp of the connection between water and growth: A request for water and sewer service for Westland DevCo’s southwest Albuquerque development was approved by the water board this week, even though it met heavy resistance from two city councilors. Michael Cadigan and Isaac Benton on …
On California drought.
While we’re busy building pipelines to northern Nevada and figuring out how to desalinate brackish groundwater, a desert lizard called the “thorny devil” has opted for a simpler approach, according to a news piece in Science by Greg Miller: They discovered that the hinges contain tubelike channels about the width of one or two human …
Continue reading ‘Water in the Desert: Thorny Devil Edition’ »
The latest drought monitor notes the current state of our reservoirs here in the western U.S.: Despite the summer showers, many Western reservoirs remained unusually low, signaling ongoing hydrological drought. At the end of July, reservoir storage stood at 82 percent of average for this time of year in Arizona. Storage ranged from roughly two-thirds …
Continue reading ‘Drought: The Supply and Demand Question’ »