Work to avoid being somebody who discourages others from sharing their thoughts.
On the Colorado River, doing the accounting with care
It’s easy to take for granted the accounting innovations in the Colorado River governance regime’s 2007 guidelines, which have governed river management and the upstream-downstream relationships between the upper and lower basins. “Intentionally Created Surplus” (ICS) is now part of the lexicon, and the idea behind it shows enough promise that it’s at the heart of the current negotiations over the post-’07 guidelines management of the river.
But we need to be careful about the lessons that we learn, and the details of how we implement the successor to ICS. How should the successor to ICS related to action levels for reservoir management? How do we ensure that water in ICS-like accounting pools is really conserved water, part of a sincere effort to reduce basin consumptive use?
Those questions are at the heart of the argument in Floating Pools & Grand Bargains, a new white paper by Kathryn Sorensen from Arizona State University and a group of colleagues, including Eric Kuhn:
While the concept of creating storage in Lakes Powell and Mead is not new, a Floating Pool proposal inherently creates trade-offs between existing and future uses that varies from the traditional shortage sharing priorities found in the Law of the River. We are, however, facing challenges not foreseen by the drafters of the Law. Without some new and imaginative thinking, the alternative may be to turn the future of the river over to the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court. That alternative is the least likely to produce a result which allows for the flexible management of a changing river system and potentially sets up the parties for continuing legal challenges. Cooperation among Colorado River water users now is essential to creating working relationships that canmanage changing river conditions. The viability of the economy in the West is at stake.
Highly recommended.
It’s red sidewalk crack poppy season in Albuquerque
Papaver rhoeas – the common red sidewalk crack poppy.
It’s red sidewalk crack poppy season in Albuquerque.
It’s a weird ecological niche, but Papaver rhoeas, the common corn poppy (it has a bunch of other names) seems to have mastered the sidewalk cracks in my neighborhood.
Sciency people call it an archeophyte, a species that arose in its modern form in an evolutionary dance with humans. It occupies one of those fun biological spaces that challenges our notion of “natural.” Our ancestors started plowing and planting cereal crops, and the poppy hopped onto the agrarian train. Its ability to scatter lots of seeds, which can hang around for a long time waiting for the right opportunity to sprout; its fondness for disturbed soil and open, sunny fields, and such. The rapid selection pressure ramped up its evolutionary adaptive response. One thing I read even suggested that it shifts its germination and flower patterns to local climate and cropping.
We’ve got a few this year in a flower bed out front that we dug up and replanted over the winter – disturbed earth! There’s a house over by the park that has a nice unintentional bed of them in its front yard.
And they’re everywhere right now in our sidewalk cracks.
New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande: Not Dry Yet!
Crews monitoring New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande reported yesterday (April 14, 2025) that the river’s still flowing past the San Marcial railroad bridge. Just downstream of the bridge, the USGS gage dropped to zero flow yesterday morning. We’re at the pivotal moment when the fact that you have to go out and look, and finding a ribbon of continuous water, however hard to measure with a gage – the river is still flowing – counts as news.
The Rio Grande through central New Mexico will begin drying soon from the bottom up, as the meager flows coming in from upstream disappear:
- into a web of canals that distribute the water across its former flood plain
- into the ground to fill the space left behind by groundwater pumping by cities and domestic well users
- into the air as the trees along its length suck up its moisture
- and then into the desert sands around San Marcial.
River drying in May is rare and bad. The fact that the river’s on the brink of beginning to dry in mid-April is worse.
Water for irrigators
Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District water operations manager Anne Marken reported at yesterday’s board meeting on the crazy institutional hydrograph we’re now seeing. Flows are up for now on the Rio Chama, but that extra water won’t be making its way down to the Middle Valley right away. Instead, it’s being stored for use later in the year by the Middle Rio Grande Pueblos, which have senior rights under the 1928 legislation that provided federal funding to create the District works. There’s continuing tension over this, because storing more water to meet legal obligations to the Pueblos (which have senior water rights) means less water for non-Indian irrigators. Lots of cryptic signalling about this debate at yesterday’s MRGCD meeting, but little explicit discussion of the hydrologic, economic, social and cultural tradeoffs involved. This is the kind of tough stuff that has to be dealt with in coping with dry years.
Storage in Abiquiu is going up, and the Bureau of Reclamation is adding a little bit of water to El Vado, the busted dam on the Rio Chama that can hold a little bit of water despite its shortcomings. I’m not privy to the internal accounting, but this appears to be Pueblo “prior and paramount” water.
Cochiti releases
Also at yesterday’s meeting, MRGCD leadership was unusually vocal about frustration with the way the Corps of Engineers has been managing Cochiti Dam releases – lots of ups and downs that have made it hard to manage diversions for irrigators, as district chief Jason Casuga explained in unusually blunt terms.
As I said, this is the kind of tough stuff that has to be dealt with in coping with dry years.
The Bureau of Reclamation has money for some supplemental environmental flow water water this year, imported San Juan-Chama Project water. But there’s very little of that. (The e-flow water helps the irrigators – the fish don’t consume it!)
With no water in storage from previous years, Middle Valley irrigators, as we’ve said before, will have a very water-short year this year. What we’re seeing right now may be the most we see this year.
Marken:
So I wish I had better news, but I I think this could be one of the most challenging irrigation seasons the Middle Valley has experienced in recent history. And you know, as always, I encourage everyone to pray for rain.
New Mexico’s incredible shrinking Rio Grande
Shrinking river
My Utton Center colleague Rin Tara and I spent the day out in the field yesterday, a visit to River Mile 60 at the bottom end of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande.
(Disclosure: We took bikes, but “out in the field” sounds fancier than “on a bike ride.”)
Shrinking when it should be growing.
The trip was fodder for a piece I’m working on looking at the US Bureau of Reclamation’s Middle Rio Grande river maintenance program carried out under the Flood Control Acts of 1948 and ‘50. Or possibly it’s a piece about the flooding in the 1920s that doomed the community of San Marcial. Or maybe its a piece about the remarkable geomorphology of a high sediment load river doing river things.
Or maybe it’s just a piece about a breathtaking expanse of desert with a struggling river valley flowing through its heart. Probably all of those things, which is why, dear readers, that you may not see the piece for a while.
The river, as defined by the presence of water, was barely there. It’s a weird stretch where sediment built up when it was the delta for the high stands of Elephant Butte Reservoir, a quaint reminder of when we had a lot of water. The river is now cutting back down through the debris, and the whole area is a mess from a human water management perspective.
From the river’s perspective? Meh, it’s just a river doing river things.
At a time when flows should be rising as a result of melting snow, they are declining as a result of the absence of melting snow. We cut the bike ride shorter than I had planned, because it was hot and I am old. But I’ll be back. It’s a lovely spot, and I have to figure out what to write.
Quoting Jack Schmidt
“Everybody keeps hoping that the only way we’re going to really rebuild storage is if we have another ridiculous, gangbuster year like 2023,” said Jack Schmidt, a watershed sciences professor at Utah State University and Director of its Center for Colorado River Studies.
But, he continued, “that’s highly unlikely.”
Quoting Amber Wutich
Nowadays, almost no one’s experience of water insecurity is dependent on the physical availability of water in their local environment.
What determines how much water we have is the kinds of infrastructure we build, the economies that we built to manage the water, the values we put on the water, and so if we want to address problems of water insecurity, we have to start with the human parts of the system and work in concert with the hydrology and the biophysical parts of the system.
Dancing with Deadpool on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande
Dancing with Deadpool
We are heading into a remarkable year on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande. Here are some critical factors:
- The preliminary April 1 forecast from the NRCS is for 27 percent of median April – July runoff at Otowi, the key measurement gage for New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande.
- Current reservoir storage above us is basically nothing.
- Reclamation’s most recent forecast model runs suggest flow through Albuquerque peaked in February. It usually peaks in May.
We will learn a great deal this year.
What I’m Watching
City Water
At last night’s meeting of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority’s Technical Customer Advisory Committee, water rights manager Diane Agnew said the utility is planning to shut down its river diversions, shifting system operations to groundwater, by the end of April. Albuquerque invested ~half a billion dollars in its river diversion system, in order to make direct use of our San Juan-Chama Project water, to relieve pressure on the aquifer. This will be the fifth year in a row that Rio Grande flows have been so low that we can’t use the new system for a substantial part of the year.
(For the nerds, Diane’s incredibly useful slides from last night’s TCAC meeting are here, the 4/3/2025 agenda packet.)
We have groundwater. My taps will still run, and I’ll be able to water my yard. But we’ll once again be putting stress on the aquifer that we’ve been trying to rest, to set aside as a safety reserve for the future. Is that future already here?
Irrigation
Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District irrigators who depend on ditch water are going to have a tough year, with supplies running short very early. The impacts here are a little weird.
Most of the relatively small number of the non-Indian full-on commercial farmers have supplemental wells. Smaller operators, who farm as a second income, will have to rely on their first income, whatever that is, and hope for some monsoon rains to get more cuttings of hay. Lots of hobby farmers will just run their domestic wells, or buy hay for their horses from out of state.
Native American farming is a more complicated story that I don’t fully understand. State and federal law recognize the fact that they were here first – we really do kinda comply with the doctrine of prior appropriation here. Their priority rights – “prior and paramount” – were enshrined in federal law in the 1928 act of Congress that kicked in federal money through the predecessor of the Bureau of Indian Affairs – crucial money to get construction of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District started when no one else – neither the rest of the federal government, nor the bond market – was willing to pony up the money. (Buy our new book Ribbons of Green, as soon as UNM Press publishes it! It includes a deep dive into the critical role of the Pueblos in supporting the formation and early funding of the MRGCD, without which there likely would be no MRGCD.)
Is there a way to set aside some prior and paramount water for Pueblo farmers this year to keep their fields green?
River Drying
The Rio Grande through Albuquerque will go dry, or nearly so, in a way we haven’t seen since the early 1980s. That means a very tough year for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow. We’re testing the boundaries of the definition of “extinction”. (To understand the minnow story, I again commend you to my Utton Center colleague Rin Tara’s terrific look at the minnow past and future.)
Do people care, either about the minnow or the river itself? We’ll find out!
Bosque
Our riverside woods, a ribbon of cottonwood gallery forest that took root in the mid-20th century between the levees built by the Bureau of Reclamation, will likely stay relatively green. The trees dip their roots into the shallow aquifer. As we’ve seen with the more routine river drying that happens every year to the south, the bosque muddles through.
Do people care about the bosque?
Affluent Green
Those affluent neighorhoods in the “villages” of Los Ranchos and Corrales and the like, with big lots and domestic wells, will almost certainly stay as green as ever. (In fact, they’ve stayed super-green while the rest of Albuquerque has trended brown in our 30-year quest to preserve our aquifer.) All of that pumping, from a shallow aquifer adjacent to the Rio Grande, is complicit in the river’s drying.
Do people think this is fair? Does anyone care? We’ll find out!
Do People Care?
This is my most serious question, the thing I’m watching, and the question is not just rhetorical. What I’ve described above is a system with substantial resilience to a shock like this. I spend my life with river nerds, water nerds, and we care a lot! It’s likely that if you’re read this far, you’re part of this community as well.
But I can see how it would be easy to live one’s life in Albuquerque and not really notice any of this. Maybe that’s the point of building all this resilience into the system. Maybe that’s OK, I’m not gonna judge.
Do people care?
We’ve got a podcast!
My Utton Center pal Rin Tara and I are excited to launch “Water Matters,” our new podcast. Our first guest is Diane Agnew from the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, who is charming and also breaks some news.
Find it here, or, as they say on podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.
It’s been dry in Albuquerque
Since Dec. 1, we’ve had 0.16 inch of measurable precipitation, the driest on record (records go back to 1892).
It’s a cherry pick. We did have a wet November, but that joy is long gone. It just feels crinkly out there.