Rio Grande Report, May 12, 2025

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New Mexico Rio Grande reservoir storage status diagram showing low reservoir levels up and down the river.

A great emptiness

From the agenda packet for this afternoon’s (May 12, 2025) meeting of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District board.

(They do one of these every month, I always find them interesting, and I always forget to post them.)

26.5 miles are currently dry in the lower stretch of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande, in the stretch between Socorro and Elephant Butte Reservoir, though the Low Flow Conveyance Channel (a big canal next to the river’s main channel through this lower reach – it’s an engineered system, what counts as “river” is semantics at this point) is flowing, and water is still flowing through the Elephant Butte Narrows.

The river’s actually up right now through Albuquerque thanks to last week’s rain and the warmup melting off some last bits of snow. But this is likely the peak.

Colorado River negotiators won’t be appearing at Getches-Wilkinson conference

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Alex Hager had a piece today on the decision by the Colorado River basin states principles to not appear at next month’s Getches-Wilkinson conference in Boulder. In a process where decisions are being made behind closed doors, outside of public view, Getches-Wilkinson is one of the few places those charged with the decisions show up in public, explain themselves, and answer our questions.

I said stuff:

“The unwillingness to answer the public’s questions suggests that negotiations aren’t going well,” said John Fleck, who teaches water policy at the University of New Mexico. “I think it misses an important obligation in democratic governance of a river that serves 40 million people.”

Alex did a nice job of summarizing the weird nature of this process. We tend to take it for granted, but it’s worth remembering this weirdness:

Unlike many government processes, Colorado River policymakers work in a space that does not involve a mandate for public access. Their meetings are often held behind closed doors, are not listed publicly and do not yield minutes or records that can be viewed by the public….

Reporters’ requests to state water authorities that once yielded interviews with top policymakers are now often met with written statements that tend to be short on detail.

As Joanna Allhands pointed out in Alex’s piece, this undercuts the ultimate legitimacy of the results:

Joanna Allhands, an opinion writer at the Arizona Republic who has written about the Colorado River’s “bankruptcy of leadership,” said more transparency from water policymakers “would be smart as a matter of self preservation.”

“Whatever the decision is made,” she said, “Whatever alternative gets chosen, if people feel like they’ve been left out, guess where we’re headed? We’re going to the Supreme Court.”

It rained

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Cloudy sky over a muddy river, lined by green cottonwoods with a bridge in the distance.

Mud!

A week of rain (I exaggerate, six days) has lifted our spirits after one of the driest starts to a calendar year on record in Albuquerque. The river was muddy yesterday on the family Wednesday lunch outing, and the cottonwoods looked so happy. The wild roses were blooming, we stuck our noses in them to smell.

And yet….

Graph showing continued low flow at the Albuquerque Rio Grande gage.

Lowest on this date since 1996.

  • Percentile ranking of yesterday’s flow: 7 (record goes back to 1965)
  • Lowest flow on this date in history since 1996.

 

66

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An irrigation ditch flanked by a dirt road with trees and a cloudy sky.

Ditchbanks FTW.

The cycling trick in our linear north-south Rio Grande Valley is to match the Rail Runner with the wind.

The best rides (where by “best” I mean “my favorite”) are in the valley, along the river and the ditchbanks that make up our ribbons of green.

A wind rose showing a bike ride dominated by a tailwind.

A modest tailwind, graph courtesy the excellent David at intervals.icu

A wind out of the north calls for a train ride north, and a ride back down the valley. A wind out of the south, as was forecast today, calls for a southbound train, in this case to Belen, and a ride back up the valley into town with the wind at one’s back.

The southbound train is early, so it’s mostly a warm season thing – early out the door to beat the heat – but the northbound train is a great bike riding tool year round.

This morning we caught the 6:30 southbound to Belen, arguably the southernmost peri-urban outpost of the greater Albuquerque metro area. Our route included a stretch on the east side of the river we’d never ridden because the key road, NM47, is an unnerving mix of kinda busy with no shoulder. But the ultimate goal is to ride everywhere, so for completeness sake today we gave it a go, using parallel ditchbanks whenever possible.

I switched from miles to kilometers this year for my annual ride-my-age birthday outing. The last few years I’d used an electric bike for the big rides, but this year I’m almost entirely riding a new acoustic bike (a guitar-playing friend coined this for me, though others have perhaps stumbled to the same locution?), so 66 km on the acoustic it was.

The weather was perfect. A cloud deck kept it cool, the rain mostly left us alone, and the tailwind, while not as strong as forecast, spent more time at our backs than anywhere else.

The ride was full of delights. There were:

  • a small farm field with turkeys and a very curious llama (I couldn’t get ‘em both in the same picture.)
  • lots of ditchbanks, with enough rain last night to firm up the dirt without leaving it muddy
  • egrets, lots of ‘em, cattle egrets and those other ones I can’t remember the names of
  • happy cows dining al fresco
  • a sacred place, and a plea to protect sacred places, and an ensuing conversation about atheists and Mormons and John Lennon’s Irish heritage that’s too convoluted for a blog post – but not too convoluted for a bike ride!
  • an unfortunate incident at the day’s second Lotaburger. I don’t think you could say that, technically, we got kicked out. No, we definitely did not get kicked out of Lotaburger.
  • A reminder that New Mexico State Highway 314, up from Los Lunas through Isleta Pueblo, is one of the great local bike rides – flanked by a cottonwood forest in the full green of early spring, slicing through desert wetlands, with a wide well-paved shoulder.

To top it off, the final few miles required dodging a thunderstorm, triangulating between my weather radar app and a group text among family members spread out around town. I hit my 66th kilometer just before reaching the shelter of the bus stop for the ride home, just before the first hailstones hit.

 

 

 

Quoting Luna Leopold

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The difficulty we find ourselves in is not due to the fact that the present drought is impossible to imagine. It could not be predicted, but its eventual occurrence was assured. We are caught with minimal plans to deal with an event sure to occur. Whereas for earthquakes the occurrence is not susceptible to probability analysis because the causal mechanisms are not random, for climate the hydrologic phenomena of flood and drought may be treated statistically, and good estimates of probability are available to us. The departure from the mean value is expectable, but the particular year or years in which it will occur cannot be forecast. Such is the nature of hydrologic events.

In a management philosophy and plan, it is far more necessary to minimize impact of dry years than to contend with wet ones. Though the risk of a deficient year is always present, seldom are definite plans on hand to cope with the situation when it finally arises. Rather, at the time of crisis there is a tendency toward grandiose plans to eliminate one further increment of risk, but a residual risk remains. The same crisis will occur again, less often but equally sure. Now is the time to lay plans for meeting an assured future event.

– Luna Leopold, address to the Governor’s Conference on the California Drought, Los Angeles, California, March 7, I977, later published as “A reverence for rivers.” Geology 5, no. 7 (1977): 429-430.

A modest Colorado River proposal

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A group* of my Colorado River collaborators has put together what we hope can be a useful set of foundational principles as the basin states and federal leadership search for a path toward a negotiated agreement for post-2026 Colorado River management. They’re based on a number of key premises:

  • The Colorado River Compact will remain the foundation of the river’s management, but we have to find a way past the deep disagreement between Upper and Lower basin states on what the Compact actually says.
  • Colorado River Basin tribes must be essential partners in crafting the next set of guidelines, including through compensation for foregone water use.
  • Shared pain is essential. The path toward a sustainable river system requires everyone to contribute to the solution to the problem of the river we all share.

There’s more. I encourage you to read the whole thing. (It’s short!)

* In alphabetical order: Anne Castle, John Fleck, Eric Kuhn, Jack Schmidt, Kathryn Sorensen, Katherine Tara.

Wrecking Ball Report: Western Water Assessment

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The Western Water Assessment, a federally funded research and outreach group based at the University of Colorado, sent a note to its stakeholders yesterday informing us that the new administration’s plans to eliminate large swaths of federal climate spending include WWA’s primary funding source:

We know that it can be hard to keep track of all of the news these days, and wanted to reach out to let you know that proposed changes to NOAA would eliminate the office that funds our work with you, which could mean the end of Western Water Assessment as a NOAA-funded program.

We are hard at work exploring alternative options so that we can continue to partner with and serve you. That includes our work holding community hazard planning workshops, improving rural community wildfire recovery, providing our ‘one-stop-shop’ Intermountain West Climate Dashboard and Summaries, supporting water planning efforts, and more.

In my Colorado River management world, that work includes the indispensable Colorado River Basin State of the Science report.

Rio Grande drying in central New Mexico

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Via Laura Paskus:

The Middle Rio Grande began drying on April 15, and on Monday more than 18 miles were dry south of Albuquerque. We should expect poor conditions to expand in the coming weeks and months — and plan accordingly.

Historically, the Rio Grande experienced snowmelt-driven spring pulses, which spurred fish like the endangered Rio Grande Silvery Minnow to spawn.

But this year, biologists have already had to collect minnows2 from the drying riverbed.

And this:

Last week, when I mentioned river drying at a social event, someone asked me, “Why do you care?” And all I can think is, “How can you not?”

On the Colorado River, doing the accounting with care

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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.