Eric Kuhn points out that the Colorado River in Glenwood Canyon on Colorado’s West Slope, and its major tributary here the Roaring Fork, peaked last Friday, right around the time I was up there gawking at all the water: Flows on the Colorado River at Dotsero and the Roaring Fork River at Glenwood Springs …
The Phoenix City Council today agreed to pay the Gila River Indian Communities $2 million as part of a deal to leave 40,000 acre feet of the Indian Communities’ Colorado River water in Lake Mead this year. The state of Arizona, the federal government, and the Walton Family Foundation also are contributing. From the city …
KAWUNEECHE VALLEY – The Colorado River was flowing this morning at around 700 cubic feet per second at the USGS gauge near Baker Gulch. It felt like a lot of water – spilling the channel banks and out into the meadows, as is its way in a good spring runoff. If you look downstream at …
Based on hydrological model simulations and a new snowmelt tracking algorithm, we show that 53% of the total runoff in the western United States originates as snowmelt, despite only 37% of the precipitation falling as snow. In mountainous areas, snowmelt is responsible for 70% of the total runoff. By 2100, the contribution of snowmelt to …
Continue reading ‘As climate warms, a decline in snowmelt runoff’ »
A sometimes poorly understood piece of the water story is the question of scale – the truly enormous quantities of water required to do human stuff like be a city or grow our food. This is the shortcoming of well-meaning suggestions like building a pipeline to the Missouri River or a string of desalination plants …
There’s something that really jumps out in the Bureau of Reclamation’s final accounting of 2016 Lower Colorado River Basin water use. In May, the Bureau releases the official accounting, which is a meticulous, tedious, closely watched and monitored and argued over report on who used how much water on the Lower Colorado. Much to digest in the …
Continue reading ‘Imperial Irrigation District is saving a lot of water’ »
Did you know that there are 16 separate federal “activities and programs” with some sort of jurisdiction over and responsibility for rural water? 18 for drought mitigation and response? I did not. I mean, I had a general idea, but not in the sort of excruciating and incredibly useful detail as you can find in …
Continue reading ‘Why you should be reading Brett Walton’s “Federal Water Tap”’ »
Here in New Mexico, in the relatively populous Middle Rio Grande Valley, we have no expectation that water rights – the legal question of who is entitled to the use of how much water – will ever be clearly determined, at least not in the lifetimes of anyone involved in water management today. The institutional …
“A lively debate, provocatively labeled ‘conservation in the Anthropocene,’,” my University of New Mexico colleague Ben Jones and collaborators wrote last year, “has been taking place over what conservation, and related notions of naturalness and preservation, means where large natural systems are increasingly inter-connected or coupled to human systems.” In particular, Jones et al. were …
Matt Weiser (Water Deeply) has a nice interview with Mike Cohen (Pacific Institute) about one of the most interesting policy conundrums in Colorado River Basin water governance – the question of the Salton Sea. Here’s the sequence. California needs to figure out how to use less Colorado River water. Since the biggest chunk of the …
Continue reading ‘When a water supply problem becomes an air quality problem’ »