New Mexico’s incredible shrinking Rio Grande

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Graph of daily streamflow at the Rio Grande at Albuquerque USGS gage from 1965 to present, showing 2025 flows in blue, which decline through April—indicating an unusually low and diminishing spring runoff. Historical medians are shown for 1981–2000 (red), 2001–present (purple), and the full record (dashed green), with shaded percentile ranges (90th–10th in blue, 70th–30th in green). Data by USGS, analysis by John Fleck, Utton Center.

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.”)

Photo of the Rio Grande in New Mexico during low flow conditions, showing a narrow, shallow stream winding through exposed sandbars and surrounded by dry, leafless vegetation under a clear blue sky.

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 Amber Wutich

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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.

– Amber Wutich

Dancing with Deadpool on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande

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Line chart showing daily total reservoir storage from 1980 to the present for Cochiti, Abiquiu, El Vado, and Heron reservoirs in acre-feet. The chart includes maximum and minimum daily storage values (black lines), overall mean (green dashed), means for 1980–2000 (red) and 2001–2024 (purple), and 2025 values to date (blue). Shaded bands represent the 10th–90th percentile range (blue) and 30th–70th percentile range (green). Storage peaks in late spring and declines through the fall. Storage for 2025 is near record lows.

Dancing with Deadpool

We are heading into a remarkable year on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande. Here are some critical factors:

  1. 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.
  2. Current reservoir storage above us is basically nothing.
  3. 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?

 

Ernie Pyle Beach

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Black and white photo of six boys standing on a platform in water, apparently preparing to dive in.

Ernie Pyle Beach, Albuquerque, circa 1949. Courtesy Albuquerque Museum.

I’m back after a couple of months’ hiatus to working on Ribbons of Green, the new book Bob Berrens and I are finishing up for publication next year by UNM Press. The current task, putting together the final package of art, is a blast. There’s more than a little tedious technical work (sorting out copyright permissions and getting tech formatting right), but mostly it’s just fun to look at all the old pictures.

The picture above is from 1949, capturing a moment in the endless on-again, off-again history of what we now call “Tingley Beach,” a riverside park along the Rio Grande close to Albuquerque’s Central Avenue Bridge – Route 66.

The park is a fascinating piece of the history of Albuquerque’s relationship with the river at its heart. Originally called “Conservancy Beach,” it was built in the 1930s as a sort of replacement for the vernacular swimming holes then being foreclosed by the construction of drains and levees disconnecting the community from the river. It was by all accounts a hit, pretty quickly renamed after then-mayor Clyde Tingley.

A line of people fishing at an artificial pond with a concrete sidewalk behind them.

Fishing derby, Tingley Beach, April 2018. Photo by John Fleck

In 1949, the city council renamed it “Ernie Pyle Beach,” after the war hero/correspondent who made his home in Albuquerque. (The old house is now a cute little community library.) Other names offered up at the March 15, 1949 meeting of the Albuquerque City Commission by city recreation director Irene Teakell: Zia Agua Beach, Cactus Beach, and Albuquerque Beach.

Every Sunday back then, the Albuquerque Game Protection Association taught “plug and fly casting,” and the Red Cross taught life saving classes.

Fears of unsanitary conditions dogged the swimming area – this was the time of polio – with the swimming areas closed and opened and closed again, and fishing coming to dominate its use. The name seems to have reverted from Ernie Pyle Beach to Conservancy Beach in 1966, though my research here is thin. When we moved to Albuquerque in 1990, it was pretty ratty, but two decades ago the city of Albuquerque under mayor Martin Chavez re-dug the ponds, cleaned it up, and now it’s a lovely and very popular spot to go fishing on a spring day.

One pond now is devoted to remote control boats, one is for kids fishing, one is for regular fishing, and one is for fancy fishing. Over the years since its construction, the island in the middle of the largest fishing pond has attracted a bunch of cormorants, which makes sense – we fill it with cormorant food. It’s got the best parking spot for river access, with a platform out by the river suitable for yoga classes and weddings and for John to stop and take another picture of the river. Our paved riverside bike trail, which runs (fully grade separated, no traffic crossings) the entire length of the river through town slips between Tingley Beach and the river.

Viewed across the span of the last century, it’s a great spot to take stock of Albuquerque’s relationship with the Rio Grande.

Stuff I’m reading

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In sorting out the implications of how the federal chaos is playing out in real, on-the-ground effects on things I think about as a New Mexican and westerner, there are a a few independent writers who I am finding invaluable right now.

There is a ton of D.C.-outward journalism being done right now about our issues, lots of it quite good. (Shoutout to Annie Snider, Jennifer Yachnin, and the team at Politico/E&E, thankfully UNM Law, where I have a modest part time position, pays to get me past at least part of their confusing paywall.)

I’m talking here about the view from out here in the west. The key is getting beyond the hair-on-fire show, which requires relying on folks who have been on the ground writing about these issues for a long time and understand the way the hair-on-fire part (because it’s really on fire!) connects with on-the-ground impacts:

Big Pivots

Allen Best has been writing about resource issues in the West for a long time. Big Pivots is about, as he puts it, “energy and water transitions in Colorado and beyond,” and he’s been doing a great job of keeping his eye on his actual subject, rather than being so distracted by the DC chaos.

Land Desk

Jonathan Thompson writes sharply about the west’s public lands. Like Best, Thompson is starting from his subject matter and looking up from that to the hair-on-fire, wrecking ball stuff, to help explain the impacts.

Western Water Notes

Daniel Rothberg has long been one of my favorite western water journalists. Again, his starting point is western water, rather than the chaos.

RSS and Business Models

RSS feeds are having a moment right now, as we try to reclaim our attention from social media and algorithmic feeds. That’s how I read these people. Like me, with my Buy Me a Coffee tip jar, these people have indie business models – support them if you can. But also, read them.

 

Wrecking ball report: Weather balloon launches

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Public goods, as my economist friends like to point out, are under provided.

Today’s example from the federal wrecking ball is National Weather Service radiosonde launches. Here’s Daniel Cusick at E&E (the key bits aren’t behind their paywall):

NOAA is “temporarily reducing” weather balloon flights from six National Weather Service offices in the Great Lakes and Mountain West, citing insufficient staffing in weather forecast offices.

In a Thursday release, NWS said it would launch only one data-collecting weather balloon daily from Aberdeen, South Dakota; Gaylord, Michigan; Grand Junction, Colorado; Green Bay, Wisconsin; North Platte, Nebraska, and Riverton, Wyoming.

The agency previously canceled weather balloon flights from Rapid City, South Dakota and Omaha, Nebraska, according to Axios, which first reported on the additional balloon cancellations. The reduction in flights began Thursday and will continue indefinitely, NOAA said.

The National Weather Service Employees Organization said last week that weather balloon flights also had been “canceled or made intermittent” at offices in Alaska, Maine and New York.

Daily radiosonde launches from National Weather Service sites across the country, coordinated with similar launches at the same time around the world, provide critical data input to weather forecast models. While satellites and other data sources play an increasingly important role, the tried and true twice-a-day weather balloon launch provides the vital skeleton on which our weather forecasts depend. A study by Britain’s Met office clearly showed that, when you take away the weather balloon data, forecast accuracy declines.

There’s something important going on here that we need to think carefully about. The decisions being made to slash US government spending right now seem focused entirely on the cost side, without considering the benefit side. It is possible that there is a cost-benefit argument that the costs of the staff making the balloon launches does not justify the benefit of improved forecasts (or the costs of degraded forecasts). But clearly no such analysis has been done here.

I’m trying to guard against my visceral anger at the wrecking ball crews, which could easily lead me to reflexively defend current all federal spending against the actions of the Trump-Musk autocratic shithousery. That would be intellectually sloppy on my part, so I’m trying hard not to fall into that trap.

But I spent years writing about the way we forecast the weather, and the benefits it provides. The benefits of good weather forecasts vastly outweigh the costs of collecting and analyzing the data. The National Weather Service and its counterparts around the world are a stunning bargain.

Thanks again to Inkstain’s supporters, who make this quasi-journalism possible.