It’s been more than a year since I’ve been able to update my Lake Mead bathtub ring pictures, but perhaps this graph, updated with the new Bureau of Reclamation projects into fall 2022, will help us visualize what we’re up against.
By Eric Kuhn The release of last week’s Bureau of Reclamation 24-month study felt like very bad news for the Colorado River (See Tony Davis for details.). But a careful reading of the numbers, and an understanding of the process through which they are developed, suggests things are likely even worse than the top-line numbers …
Continue reading ‘The April 2021 24-Month Study was a Shocker, but is it too Optimistic?’ »
From my conversation last week with Drew Kann at CNN: To Fleck, all of this signals that the reduced flows in recent years are likely not an aberration, but rather a glimpse of the challenges posed by a hotter, drier climate. “We’re now seeing the model for what the future of Colorado River Basin water …
I’m choosing my words carefully here. The “likely” in this blog’s post’s title means “based on my analysis of the Bureau of Reclamation’s current ‘most probable forecast’ Colorado River water supply model runs.” The Bureau’s current “most probable” modeling suggests that in both 2022 and 2023, the annual release from Lake Powell will only be …
Continue reading ‘Lake Mead likely to drop below elevation 1,040 by late 2023’ »
Cleaning out some old files this morning, I ran across this great quote from Pat Mulroy some years back from a talk about the problems of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Via’s Maven’s Notebook: We are very, very good at saying no. We are very, very good at blocking. Anybody can stop anything. What we can’t …
Continue reading ‘The tragedy of the anticommons – we’re good at saying “no”’ »
.@VP Kamala Harris: "For years and generations, wars have been fought over oil. In a short matter of time, they will be fought over water." pic.twitter.com/88pWzvbmeA — The Hill (@thehill) April 7, 2021
I mostly hate log scale in graphs I use for broad communication purposes. It’s just not intuitive. But I’ve made the switch for this year’s Rio Grande, because the flows are so low that we need the log scale, because at really low flows small changes become big, if that makes any sense. The difference …
Continue reading ‘Rio Grande so low I needed to switch to log scale’ »
My friend and colleague Becky Bixby (UNM biologist, associate director of the UNM Water Resources Program) gave a great talk recently about her work on the diatoms – little light-eating algae – on the margins of our river. (first 10-ish minutes is Becky)
An email exchange with a friend who helps manage New Mexico’s water led to the graph above, my first stab at a visualization to try to show the accumulation of two bad years’ flow on the Rio Grande. Not quite sure this does all the work yet that I need of it, but perhaps worth …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico’s Rio Grande: Last year bad, this year worse’ »
No sooner did my spring break begin a week ago (quite literally within a couple of hours of the end of my last class before break) than I got sick. This has led to much laying around, and resting, which I think was the point? I’m finally on the mend, and a friend got me …
Continue reading ‘Some data on a bad year on New Mexico’s Rio Grande’ »