Another of my attempts to visualize data from this remarkably bad water year in New Mexico. The cloud of gray lines is flow at the Gila gauge as the river leaves its headwaters mountains in southwestern New Mexico, one line for each year. The red line is this year – significantly lower than in any …
I took the long way home from a meeting in Alamos, Colorado, yesterday to make a pilgrimage to San Luis. In the Culebra Valley of Colorado in the high country near the New Mexico border, San Luis lays claim to being the oldest town in Colorado, settled by the descendants of Spanish immigrant families. Native …
Continue reading ‘Old water – the San Luis People’s Ditch’ »
I stopped on the Gail Ryba Bridge over the Rio Grande this morning, the bike bridge adjacent to Interstate 40 that offers one of the great views of our river. The morning light was lovely, I saw a couple of egrets in the ditch down below. I love this place. Flows right now are stable …
Putting together a talk for our (UNM’s) big water conference tomorrow, I had occasion to fall completely in love with this Arthur Rothstein photo from his 1936 trip through New Mexico for the Farm Service Administration:
Catching up after a busy final week of the semester at the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program, I had time today to sit down and and think through the implications of this remarkable Bureau of Reclamation press release. It did a great job of achieving one of the primary goals of a news …
Continue reading ‘Federal pressure to do a Colorado River water conservation deal’ »
I went out to the Rio Grande yesterday morning to talk to KOB’s Eddie Garcia about the prospect of a drying Rio Grande through Albuquerque this summer. The final forecast numbers put this year’s runoff at just 18 percent of the long term average. The flow right now at Embudo, as the Rio Grande is …
Our UNM Water Resources Program students used the Gila River in New Mexico for their spring case study projects, so I’ve made it a habit to watch the USGS “Gila near Gila” gauge. Class is finished, but the habit is not. Flow there dropped below 30 cubic feet per second this evening. Update: I didn’t …
Continue reading ‘Historic low flows on New Mexico’s Gila River’ »
There’s a rock I keep pushing up a hill. But powerful forces are at work, and the rock keeps slipping my grasp and rolling back down. So I chase it down, and start anew. I’ve given more than 30 public talks around the western United States since my book came out nearly two years ago, …
Led by California, the states of the Lower Colorado River Basin had their lowest consumptive water use in 2017 since 1992, according to a near-final tally by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The final numbers won’t be out until mid-May, so could change slightly, but at this point they won’t change much. And they show …
Continue reading ‘2017 Lower Colorado River Basin water use the lowest in a quarter century’ »
A guest post from Water Nerd, originally posted in the comments here and lifted, with permission, into a post of its own. It’s a valuable contribution to the discussion of the current scrapping on the Colorado River. ******** One of the most interesting ideas you discuss in your book is the application of Elinor Ostrom’s …