The utility of a model is seldom in its ability to deliver a precise value but rather in whether it provides an improved understanding of a system that would not have existed in its absence. – Kevin Wheeler, Modeling to Support Water Management Negotiations
We identified fallowed land—an unplanted agricultural land parcel—as a key anthropogenic dust source in California. Specifically, we find that the Central Valley accounts for about 77% of total fallowed land areas in California, where they are associated with about 88% of major anthropogenic dust events. We also find that the geographic coverage of these fallowed …
Total flow to date on the Rio Grande at Otowi is the lowest since 1964. Otowi is the place where the river leaves the upper valleys and enters the canyons that lie at the head of the valley of Albuquerque, what we in New Mexico call the “Middle Rio Grande.” The graph shows total …
Continue reading ‘The driest year on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande since 1964’ »
A bunch of odds and ends cluttering my brain, blog posts that are half written in my mind that are in the way: Quoting Luis Villa on accessing the open data commons We’ve been talking about open data for a long time, but since using data is hard to consume and manipulate, open data has …
Continue reading ‘“the nearest thing I have seen to being true”’ »
Enrique Romero joins Rin and I on Water Matters to discuss acequias and querencia. (This podcast thing is a blast!)
Autumnal equinox news briefs: I was on the phone in the front room of our house yesterday evening, facing east, as the setting sun dropped beneath the clouds after a short burst of rain. Rainbow. And the conversation, with the cousin of an old friend who died earlier this year, was rich. The Rio Grande …
Continue reading ‘A rainbow, a river, and the first cranes of fall’ »
Deepening and widening of stream channels in the Southwest is a phenomenon that has taken place within the memory of men now living. It began at different dates from 1860 on and has progressed at different rates on several streams, as summarized in a recent paper.²? The flood plains of numerous minor streams are yet …
By Jack Schmidt,1 Anne Castle,2 John Fleck,3 Eric Kuhn,4 Kathryn Sorensen,5 Katherine Tara,6 While Colorado River Basin attention is focused on negotiating post-2026 operating rules, a near term crisis is unfolding before our eyes. If no immediate action is taken to reduce water use, our already-thin buffer of storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead …
Continue reading ‘Analysis of Colorado River Basin Storage Suggests Need For Immediate Action’ »
NEAR THE CONFLUENCE OF THE RIO PUERCO AND THE RIO GRANDE – The broad delta where the Rio Puerco meets the Rio Grande in central New Mexico has never been a great place to live, though people try. To the east, across the river, the Ancestral Puebloan Piro built the village Spanish colonizers named “Sevilleta” …
Alert Inkstain reader Rolf asked in the comments of last weekend’s post for a version of the above graph – number of days of low flow at the Central Avenue Bridge – with a threshold above zero. I usually set the threshold at 25, because our experience in the last two drying episodes – 2022 …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico’s Dry Middle Rio Grande: More Data Visualizations’ »