At the eastern end of Sandia Road NW in Albuquerque is a ratty but important piece of Albuquerque’s water management history – City Well #2. Maintained now by the US Geological Survey, City #2 was installed in the late 1950s, a pivotal time in Albuquerque water management. The community’s population was booming. To meet the …
By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck On Saturday, April 1st, 1922, at 9:00 AM in Denver’s iconic Brown Palace Hotel, Chairman Herbert Hoover opened the 9th meeting of the Colorado River Commission. The official meeting lasted only 30 minutes. The commission took only one action of consequence. It asked its members to submit to Executive …
Lake Powell ended March 2022 at elevation 3,523, down 40 feet from a year ago. Lake Mead, which sees less fluctuation because of the (relatively) steady inflow from Powell upstream, ended March at elevation 1,061.5 – down just 23 feet from last year. “Launch Ramp Closed” is the least of our problems.
Eric Kuhn: One hundred years ago, we had some flexibility because the river was not very well-used. Today, not a drop of the Colorado River reaches the Gulf of California, so we don’t have that luxury. The way I look at it is: we legally allocated water based on an assumption that this river system …
Ok, the logjam isn’t cleared yet, but we can see how the clearing will happen. Also, it’s not really Rio Grande storage, it’s the Rio Chama. But it’s a tributary to the Rio Grande. Headline writer’s prerogative. The deal is that El Vado Reservoir on the Chama, where central New Mexico stores its irrigation water, …
The only lever we currently control is the demand lever. – Brad Udall, Stegner Colorado River Symposium, March 18, 2022 Colorado State University climate researcher Brad Udall poked again last week at a question he’s been thinking and speaking about for the past year – the knock-on effects of summer warming in the Colorado River …
Continue reading ‘Brad Udall on the Drying of the Colorado River Basin’ »
The most interesting news at this week’s University of Utah Stegner Symposium on the Colorado River Compact, past and future may be the news that we didn’t hear. It was an amazing gathering, bringing together pointy headed academics like me with most of the basin management leadership team from tribes, state and local agencies, and …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River Compact at 100; Lake Powell at 3,524.42’ »
I’d just turned my bike onto the old potash mine road out of Moab, down the Colorado River, this morning when a friend texted me a picture of a digital readout on a wall that I presume to be deep in the bowels of Glen Canyon Dam: WATER LEVEL 525 The “3” goes without saying, …
By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck The Colorado Commissions’ 8th Meeting Wednesday, March 15th, 1922, Phoenix, Arizona After a six-week break from the disappointing series of negotiating meetings that ended on January 31st in Washington, D.C., the commissioners from the seven U.S. Colorado River Basin states and the federal government reconvened for the group’s 8th …
tl;dr – We’ve got a bunch of really interesting interdisciplinary work underway at the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program. If you know someone finishing their undergraduate work or early in their career, interested in water work beyond the solely sciency/engineering paths, send them our way! longer It’s weird, but now that I’m no …