Tom Philp had a great piece in Water Deeply last week about the language we use: Water policy becoming a prisoner of its own limited vocabulary, particularly when it comes to the weather. Here is a case that “drought” and “normal” belong in the dustbin of history, for their overuse can lead to the wrong conversation. …
Continue reading ‘“drought” – Philp on weather, water, and yesteryear’s language’ »
The preliminary Feb. 1 forecast for runoff on New Mexico’s rivers, out this evening, is now projecting record or near-record low flows for the 2018 runoff season. It would take an epic wave of wet storms from here on out to bring the river to anything approaching a “normal” year, and no such epic wave …
Continue reading ‘The Rio Grande forecast keeps getting worse’ »
Sarah Tory had an interesting piece Friday about an effort to keep water in Colorado’s Crystal River, a tributary of the Roaring Fork (Carbondale area, or Aspen for those of a certain geographical bent). Tory’s piece does a good job of explaining the institutional complexities of an agreement that spans potentially both opportunities for exploiting …
Fixing our Broken Water Cycle: A Conversation with Authors Sandra Postel and Abbie Landis, Webinar Feb. 12
I’ve been thinking about the central communication challenge as we face down yet another dry year amid the continued drumbeat of Upper Basin talk about finding new ways to take more water out of the Colorado River. It goes back to something I wrote in my book: Within the network of state and water-agency representatives …
Continue reading ‘The central challenge on the Colorado River’ »
For today’s #tbt (Throwback Thursday), a return to the remarkable era of Steve Reynolds in New Mexico water management, and that time Reynolds tried to give New Mexico an effective veto over the Central Arizona Project. Students in this year’s UNM Water Resources Program spring class are doing a case study this year on New …
Continue reading ‘#tbt to that time New Mexico tried to demand a Gila River Compact’ »
I’ll be yammering in public Thursday in Albuquerque, y’all should come! What Did We Know and When Did We Know It: How Much Water Does the Colorado River Really Have? In retrospect, it is clear that the 1922 Colorado River Compact was negotiated during a historically wet period, and that as a result the agreement …
With an underwhelming snowpack right now, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s initial 2018 forecast (pdf here) projects combined storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two primary reservoirs on the Colorado River, will drop to 21.7 million acre feet by the end of 2018. That would be the lowest Mead/Powell combined year end storage …
Continue reading ‘Initial forecast: Lakes Mead and Powell headed for record low in 2018’ »
It finally rained yesterday morning in Albuquerque, a bit after 8 a.m., ending a 96-day dry streak. The water in the bottom of my gauge looked like strong tea as the rain washed out three months’ dust, and the relief was not measurable, but large. I ended up with 0.09 inch (2.3 mm) at my …
At yesterday’s monthly Colorado Basin River Forecast Center briefing, Greg Smith noted, by way of analogy, the winter of 1976-77. Smith explained that he wasn’t forecasting – the fact that the evolution of this year’s forecast is similar to 1976-77 doesn’t mean that the rest of this year will be like that year, or that …
Continue reading ‘What happened in the Colorado River Basin in the winter of 1976-77?’ »