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’ »
The 1928 report they call “Burkholder’s Bible” – more formally “A Plan For Flood Control, Drainage and Irrigation of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy Project” – must be treated as one of modern Albuquerque’s founding texts. Like any such text, it rewards careful reading. Also in the manner of such texts, the more you read …
Continue reading ‘“Burkholder’s Bible” – one of Albuquerque’s founding texts’ »
A guest post by David Rosenberg. David E. Rosenberg Utah State University | david.rosenberg@usu.edu | @WaterModeler The term buy-and-dry plays to the fears of farm and ranch communities. Wealthy urban water providers buy up water rights, dry out farms and ranches, encourage people to retire to Hawaii or other locales, and export the purchased water …
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Preparing for climate change on the Colorado River is hard. But we will make it harder, and narrow the scope of our options for dealing with it, if we don’t incorporate realistic flow reduction scenarios in our planning efforts. That’s the thrust of an editorial Brad Udall and I have in this week’s issue of …
Continue reading ‘Taking climate change seriously on the Colorado River: a practical step’ »
The latest US Bureau of Reclamation “24-month study” – the monthly update to projected reservoir storage on the Colorado River – shows the bottom dropping out of Lake Powell inflows after a starkly dry April. With inflows down a million acre feet from the April version of the study, the Bureau is now projecting total …
Following what NRCS forecaster Angus Goodbody describes as “an exceptionally dry April”, our anticipated Rio Grande runoff into New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande valley (meaning the flow at the Otowi gauge) is down 100,000 acre feet from a month ago. That’s about 44 percent of the 30-year mean. Importantly, April was really our last chance …
Continue reading ‘Rio Grande forecast drops another 100,000 acre feet’ »
Ima give this a fancy sciency-sounding patina: I walked a transect today across the ribbon of green the Rio Grande provides through the heart of Albuquerque. I’m trying to think through what I have come to understand as the fundamental choice we face as climate change depletes the river. We will have less green: Which …
tl;dr I’m stepping down as director of the UNM Water Resources Program at the end of summer semester to write another book. longer When I was happily toiling those many years as an inkstained wretch, I had secret fantasies of leaving newspaper work to spend my waning years on the campus of the University of …
Continue reading ‘The next steps in “my semi-charmed life of the mind”’ »