Water management, sale and delivery has traditionally been the province of government in the United States. But an interesting story out of Texas heralds some significant potential for change: In the five years since billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens started trying to sell water from beneath the vast empty spaces of West Texas, he hasn’t …
Via Coco, another scheme (this one with private money) to get water from the sparsely populated western Colorado side of the continental divide to the heavily and rapidly growing east: Time will tell whether Aaron P. Million’s plan to bring water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir to the Front Range will make him a legend in …
Christie Chisholm has a great overview in this week’s Alibi of the city of Albuquerque’s San Juan-Chama water project. What I liked is the way she captured the complexity of this project. No easy answers, no free lunch when it comes to New Mexico water: Even though the city wants to drastically cut pumping from …
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Mosquitoes feasted Tuesday morning on dignitaries who gathered in the Rio Grande bosque to commemorate the release of the millionth Rio Grande silvery minnow. The minnow release was a celebration of efforts to save the fish from extinction. The mosquitoes were a reminder of an especially wet spring— nature cooperating with …
Six Month Standardized Precipitation Index Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Not exactly what you’d expect from an El Nino winter, when the typical pattern is to have wet anomalies across the southern tier of states in the continental U.S. and drier weather to the north. As obsessed as I am with southwestern climate, if you judge …
cactus flowers May 2007 Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Lissa’s picture of one of her front yard cactus. In the desert, when it rains, they’re happy. And this May, it has rained.
Brad Udall at the Western Water Assessment has written an extremely helpful summary of the history of research into the effects of climate change on the Colorado River. It is interesting to note a consistent message in nearly 30 years of work on this question: the sign is nearly always negative. There’s not a whole …
For the more sophisticated in the Inkstain audience (either scientifically or geographically), I usually try to translate units from those we use here in America to their metric equivalents. But I realized I had no idea what the standard metric equivalent was for our quaint river flow metric – cubic feet per second. Malcolm to …
Roger Pielke Sr. and I have been having a polite disagreement today over at his blog on how to think about Richard Seager’s paper last month in Science on the risk of future drought in the southwest. Roger argues Seager’s work is contradicted by a 1997 paper by Trenberth and Hoar arguing for stronger El …
Rio Grande, May 19, 2007 Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. I’ve been otherwise occupied over the last week, so I haven’t been paying my usual attention to the river. But when I went out yesterday for a bike ride, it was wonderfully high – 3,700 cubic feet per second through Albuquerque, which I think is the …