If Kelly Redmond had a nickel for every time I’ve quoted his definition of drought, he’s have enough money for lunch today:

Wet years have a way of covering up a multitude of water management sins. Drought exposes them for all to see.

Back in the 1990s, we had all the same underlying water management problems in this state, but a string of wet years left Elephant Butte full and allowed us to ignore our problems.

A run of 13 dry years out of 15 years since then on the Lower Rio Grande has left us with insufficient water to meet the needs of all the water users in the Lower Rio Grande Valley.

Kelly’s definition of drought can be found in “The Depiction of a Drought” (pdf), BAMS, August 2002.

I’m kicking myself thinking I may have already missed the Rio Grande’s runoff peak.

Earlier in the week, the river’s flow jumped up over 2,000 cfs through Albuquerque, which ain’t much as rivers go, but there’s at least a chance that’s the best we’ll see this year. The peak usually comes much later, late May-ish, but this year has been absolutely freakish with March drying out and warming up dramatically. There’s a possibility, based on some of the modeling I’ve seen, that the river could come back up in late April-early May. I hope so.

I was finally enough over this flu thing this evening to go out for a walk on my favorite riverside path, in the woods south of the Central Avenue bridge. Out on the river I saw gadwall and a cinnamon teal and got a glimpse of the massive gray back of a great blue heron flying low over the river. Up in the swampy reeds at the south end of one of the habitat restoration project ponds, a muskrat was driving a marsh wren absolutely crazy. I mostly heard the wren, which was making a racket, but got a glimpse through the still-brown reeds left over from last year. Life bird number 248.

No picture of the wren, but here’s the dusky Rio Grande:

Dusky Rio Grande, by John Fleck, April 7, 2012

From the morning paper, a report on the April Rio Grande runoff forecast plunging off a cliff:

Gary Esslinger’s chosen profession, delivering irrigation water to southern New Mexico farmers, looks like some sort of cruel joke these days.

The latest punch line came this week in the form the federal government’s April Rio Grande runoff forecast, which calls for just 29 percent of normal spring and summer runoff into Elephant Butte Reservoir.

That’s the reservoir that supplies water to farmers in the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, in the Hatch and Mesilla valleys of southern New Mexico. Esslinger, the district’s general manager, faces the unhappy task of going back to his farmers next week and telling them to expect even less than the meager allotment they had been counting on.

“The business that I’m in, of supplying surface water, is kinda like going out of business,” Esslinger said Thursday.

From this morning’s newspaper, my story about the New Mexico state engineer’s decision to deny a proposal to pump rural groundwater from rural western New Mexico to the Rio Grande Valley:

By failing to be specific about where the water was going, the project’s backers failed to meet the requirements of state law, Verhines ruled.

The project amounted to water speculation, which is illegal, said Bruce Frederick with the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, one of the lead attorneys for a group of rural residents who fought to block the project. It is the second recent state ruling to conclude speculation is not allowed under state water law.

“All this ruling does is confirm what anybody who knows about water law and cares about water law already knew,” Frederick said Monday.

This project, the Augustin Plains Ranch proposal, is probably the least famous of three similar western water projects. As I wrote in an overview of the project last year, it would have moved 54,000 acre feet a year of water from the ranch country near the little town of Datil for unspecified uses in the Rio Grande Valley, where the bulk of New Mexico’s population lives.

It bears a striking similarity to the Cadiz project in California (similar in size, pumping an average of 50,000 acre feet per year from the Mojave Desert east of Joshua Tree National Park to coastal cities) and the much larger Southern Nevada Water Authority proposal (185,000 acre feet per year).

The legal decision here in terms of the big picture issues being discussed in these projects is quite narrow. While much of the political discussion in the Augustin Plains case surrounded area-of-origin questions – will the ranch communities where the water originates be harmed? – the New Mexico legal process never reached the point of considering that issue.

Instead, the State Engineer ruled that those proposing the project failed to clear a more preliminary threshold by not being able to specify who would use the water, where and how. In that regard Augustin Plains is very different from Cadiz and the Southern Nevada Water Authority projects.

Given that, I’m not sure there are any strong parallels to be drawn between this week’s New Mexico ruling and Cadiz or SNWA, beyond the fact that all three projects are evidence of strong pressure to do this sort of thing and the legal issues are sufficiently different here that the issues that led to the New Mexico decision don’t really apply to the other two cases.