Water in the Albuquerque Mayoral Race

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Somewhat surprisingly to me, Albuquerque’s water future has become an issue in our upcoming mayoral election. My Journal colleague Sean Olson, who used to cover the Water Utility Authority and now covers politics, interviewed the candidates for a piece in this morning’s paper:

You can’t talk about Albuquerque’s future without talking about water, and the current crop of candidates for mayor is starting to wade in.

The San Juan-Chama Drinking Water Project opened this year to provide surface water to the city, a 50-years-in-the-making public works project that will wean the city off heavy pumping of the underground aquifer.

But the new system comes with a cost: Mandatory conservation measures imposed by the state water engineer require the city to drop from the current 162 gallons a person average to 155 gallons per day or face the prospect of losing the new water source.

With Albuquerque’s Oct. 6 election nearing, the Journal interviewed the three candidates for mayor about conservation measures, future planning and a water utility that is not directly controlled by the city. In the broadest sense, they were quizzed about how they would approach Albuquerque’s water future.

The issue is a bit tangled because the Water Utility Authority is separate from city government, but the mayor (or his representative) sits on the water utility’s board, and municipal decisions on things like land use planning and building codes play a central role in our water future.

“a valueless and horrible desert”

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I’m puzzling over the real story of Oliver Meredith Wozencraft, the chap who was arguably the first person to imagine the large-scale irrigation of the deserts of the southwest with water from the Colorado River.

Oliver Meridith Wozencraft

Oliver Meredith Wozencraft

Wozencraft was a physician who came west in 1849 in search of gold and stumbled instead (apparently quite literally) onto the dream of irrigation of what came to be known as “the Imperial Valley”. But the details of the stumbling seem a bit murky.

Continue reading ‘“a valueless and horrible desert”’ »

Ghost Meter

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Some time ago I purchased an Actron CP7875 PocketTherm Infrared Thermometer from Amazon. It’s a cool gizmo. I highly recommend it. You point it at whatever, and it tells you the object’s temperature based on infrared emissions. Today, Amazon informed me that people who bought the Actron PocketTherm also might like this:

The accompanying description describes it as “the most basic tool for any ghost hunter.” I cannot attest to its usefulness.

Stephen B. Davis Jr., Back From the Dead?

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There’s some water geek hilarity over on the New Mexico Independent today correcting V.B. Price on a point of history and water law.

First Price:

New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming — the “upper basin” states in the Colorado Compact of 1922 — have “junior” water rights to California, Arizona, and Nevada, the states that comprise the “lower basin.” And that means in a crisis, upper basin states won’t get their water until lower basin states have their’s.

Not exactly, says a commenter who identifies himself as “Steve Davis”.

Do you honestly think I’d negotiate a compact that made New Mexico a “junior” water user? That was exactly the situation we were in before the compact was in place! We were going to be “junior” because California was going to develop faster than us and therefore be more senior. We negotiated the compact to PROTECT us from the situation you describe in your article. We get to use our water “in perpetuity” subject only to our obligation not to deplete the flow of the river below 75 million acre-feet over a ten year period at Lee Ferry (we’ve never violated this obligation). California is “senior” only to Arizona and Nevada by virtue of the Colorado River Basin Project Act (1968) but I’m not posting from the dead to give you a history lesson. I suggest you go back and read the compact (it’s not that long) and try to avoid trampling your forefathers next time you want to spice up a water story.

Stephen B. Davis Jr. was a New Mexico Supreme Court justice who represented the state in 1922 on the commission that negotiated the Compact. Davis was, in the words of New Mexico water historian Ira Clark, “a recognized authority on water law.” He seems to be squirming in his grave.

Colorado Compact Commission

Colorado Compact Commission

I think that’s “Steve,” second from the right. Who am I to question him on this? He is, after all, “a recognized authority on water law.”

If Stationarity Dies, How Will We Know?

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When Milly et al. pronounced the death of stationarity in Science magazine last year, lots of folks in the water world took notice. Stationarity is the idea that the envelope of variability we’ve seen is the envelope of variability we’ll get in the future. Not so in a climatically changing world?

Now come Gabriele Villarini and colleagues with an elaborate set of statistical tests poking at peak flow in 50 rivers and saying, in essence, if stationarity is dead they can’t seem to find a corpse:

Despite the profound changes that have occurred to drainage basins throughout the continental United States and the recognition that elements of the hydrologic cycle are being altered by human-induced climate change, it is easier to proclaim the demise of stationarity of flood peaks than to prove it through analyses of annual flood peak data.

Since I don’t begin to understand the technical details of their analysis, I’ll ask the wonks in the audience: Is stationarity back alive?

Thinking About Aridity

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Here’s a nice way of thinking about aridity:

If all the water that flows in each river during an average year were spread evenly over the area drained by the river, the depths would be: Delaware 20.9 in.; Columbia 13.1 in.; Mississippi 6.7 in.; Colorado 1.15 in.

Source: Water and Choice in the Colorado Basin, National Research Council, 1968

The Colorado, Then and Now

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I’m reading Frank Waters’ The Colorado, which offers an odd vantage point on the history of the river basin. It was written in 1946 when, as Waters points out in an introduction written when it was republished in the mid-1980s, Phoenix was the only city in the basin of any heft whatsoever. It is clear from the introduction that Waters couldn’t grasp the significance of the changes that had occurred in the intervening four decades. Or perhaps he was just in a hurry. Whatever, he clearly thought the changes bad.

Colorado River at its confluence with the Little Colorado

Colorado River at its confluence with the Little Colorado

When the Colorado River Compact was being negotiated in 1922, the remarkable Delph Carpenter, Colorado’s representative on the seven-state negotiating body, knew that the upper basin states were going to grow much more slowly than the lower basin states, but that they would eventually need the water. But I’m not sure what Carpenter thought that meant. The development of the Colorado’s water at the time was primarily for agriculture. That is what “reclamation” meant, right – making the desert bloom? Who, if anyone, saw the rise of Phoenix or Las Vegas, and when?

(Image courtesy Glen Canyon Adaptive Management Program)

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: It’s All About the Evaporation

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In thinking about the effects of climate change on our arid landscape, it’s easy to get distracted by precipitation numbers. Will it go up or down? How much? What’s the error bar look like? But in recent years, the research community that looks at the Southwestern U.S. has been banging away on “P minus E”. It’s not just the precipitation. It’s precipitation minus evaporation. Or, to be a bit more specific when looking at riparian systems in arid landscapes, evaporation (open water) and transpiration (the plants that live on a river’s groundwater).

Water in the Rio Grande Bosque

Water in the Rio Grande Bosque

In this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, I have a story (ad/sub req.) looking at this point through the latest research to tackle the question, by UNM climate scientist David Gutzler and research student Tessia Robbins. Journal photographer Greg Sorber and I went out to a stretch of bosque (the woods along the Rio Grande) to a site where scientists measure evapotranspiration:

In the summer, this stretch of bosque can lose the equivalent of a layer of water a quarter of an inch deep every day — far more than falls from the sky. The warmer it gets, the more this landscape dries out.

It is not the rain and snow that matters most, scientists like Cleverly say. It is the evaporation.

As Earth’s climate warms, scientists expect years-long dry spells and wet spells to continue, just as we have seen in the past.

But with warmer temperatures and the resulting increase in evaporation, it will be harder to recover from the dry spells, according to a new analysis by University of New Mexico professor David Gutzler and UNM research student Tessia Robbins.

“We’ll go into a big drought some time in the 21st century,” Gutzler said, “and we just may not pull out of it.”