Brad Udall on twitter yesterday ran through a striking series of graphs of the current state of the Colorado River. With his permission, I’m posting them here along with a slightly polished version of his accompanying commentary. Some key points that grabbed my attention: Second-lowest Powell inflow in a period of record we use dating …
Continue reading ‘Brad Udall: Second-worst Powell inflows in more than half a century’ »
Thanks to Megan Kamerick and KUNM, our New Mexico public radio juggernaut, for offering the platform and leverage to help boost our message about climate change response on the Colorado River: [N]obody’s going to sort of voluntarily raise their hand and say, ‘Yeah, we’re happy to have less.’ And so negotiating those agreements where everybody …
Holed up in a UNM Water Resources Program conference room, my book co-author Bob Berrens and I spent an afternoon last week trying to make sense of the graph above. The 1920 U.S. Census description of the greater Albuquerque area (Bernalillo County) captures a remarkable moment in our city’s history. We were a community of …
Continue reading ‘Bernalillo County Agriculture, a Very Brief History’ »
A colleague sent me this neat paper by Nicholas Irwin and colleagues at the University Nevada Las Vegas about how water use patterns shifted under initial COVID lockdowns. As you would expect, home water use went up while institutional use went down. But was it just a one-for-one offset? No… [W]e find an initial and …
Continue reading ‘Changes in municipal water use under pandemic shutdown – a neat case study’ »
By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck Unlike the Lower Colorado River Basin States, which have traditionally taken pragmatic and self-serving views of the 1922 Colorado River Compact, the Upper Basin States have largely shown the century-old document unwavering reverence. The reverence comes from the way the agreement protected Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico against …
Continue reading ‘Reverence or Pragmatism? The Upper Colorado River Basin’s Compact Dilemma’ »
On a call this morning, Smart River Person made a really simple point that goes to the heart of my frustration about our current discussions about water shortfalls on the Rio Grande. The discourse involves blaming – mostly downstream people, in this case Elephant Butte Reservoir users, blaming upstream people for mismanaging the river. You …
Continue reading ‘“This is climate change stealing your water.”’ »
We’re having a moment right now on central New Mexico’s Rio Grande as we gird for a drying river through the Albuquerque reach for the first time since 1983. Expect drying to first start showing up below the Rio Bravo bridge sometime in July, between the bridge and the Albuquerque wastewater treatment plant, where the …
Continue reading ‘What’s next on New Mexico’s Rio Grande – bearing witness to a drying river’ »
Mary Harner and I spent a good deal of time this morning trying to get our bearings walking along the west bank of Albuquerque’s Rio Grande near a place we call “the oxbow”. Mary, a friend and colleague from the University of Nebraska at Kearney, has been working on a delightful river research project for …
Continue reading ‘In a dry year, growing a new patch of Rio Grande Bosque’ »
With flows in the Rio Grande dropping rapidly, Albuquerque will stop diverting drinking water from the river Friday, switching to its groundwater wells for municipal supply. This is the second year in a row that dry conditions have so depleted the river’s flow that the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority had to shut down …
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I got an email this morning from a friend watching as the bottom begins to drop out of the Rio Grande’s flow at a place called Otowi, north of Albuquerque. When Otowi drops, the river here in Albuquerque soon follows – one of those upstream/downstream things. It’s been a weird year on our river – …
Continue reading ‘Nervously watching New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande’ »