Interesting letter from the Central Arizona Water Conservation District board leadership regarding Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan. Not sure what this means, seems kind of important. I guess we all need to set aside some time on Nov. 15 to find out. CAWCD Nov. 8, 2018 re Colorado River DCP (PDF) CAWCD Nov. 8, …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River DCP: “Arizona will figure it out, Episode II”’ »
At Colorado Mesa University’s Upper Colorado River Basin Water Forum this week in Grand Junction, a distinguished panel of the Colorado River Basin brain trust cheerfully dodged an audience question about what the basin states’ Plan B is if Arizona can’t come to the internal agreement needed to sign on to a Colorado River Drought …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan: “Arizona will figure it out.”’ »
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Last week’s cancellation of a key meeting in Arizona to work on the state’s plan to reduce its Colorado River water use was an “oh shit, what now?” moment. (Ian James’ story on the cancellation and the current state of the discussions here.) In the wake of the cancellation, there’s now a new letter, this …
Writing something new, I’ve been looking back at some stuff I wrote a few years ago about the Colorado River. The solution is, in a sense, straightforward. Everyone in the Colorado River Basin has to use less water. It’s possible to apply a simple arithmetic wave of the arm and say, for example, that we …
Continue reading ‘Whither the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan?’ »
Managing outdoor water use while maintaining urban tree cover is a key challenge for water managers in arid climates. Urban trees generate flows of ecosystem services in arid areas, but also require significant amounts of irrigation. In this paper, a bioeconomic-health model of trees and water use is developed to investigate management of an urban …
A new letter from Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Lewis to Arizona’s two top Colorado River negotiators complains that the latest version of the state’s plan to reduce its use of Lake Mead water would make things worse, in way that actual gives some Central Arizona farmers more water than they would get under …
tl;dr: A feud over how to implement Colorado River conservation adds another hurdle to final completion of the Colorado River Drought Conservation Plan. longer: While Colorado River Basin folks have been paying obsessive attention to Arizona’s struggle to come up with an internal agreement to cut back on its use of Colorado River, a second …
Heron Reservoir, the first stop for central New Mexico’s imported Colorado River Basin water, dropped Oct. 10 to its lowest level since filling after it was first built in the 1970s: As I noted last month, total storage on New Mexico’s part of the Rio Grande system is at historic lows. I updated the numbers …
Continue reading ‘The draining of New Mexico’s reservoirs continues’ »
It’s apparently Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan week! Documents here. This is when we all gather around and try to make sense of the sweeping effort to ratchet up efforts to reduce Colorado River water use to keep the system from crashing. The plan you see before you is really not that different, at the …
Continue reading ‘Creating a conservation storage pool in Lake Powell’ »