The picture’s a tease. It was taken last October, so think of it as a hint of things to come. But the hints were there aplenty this morning on my bike ride along the riverside trail – little sprinklings of single yellow leaves on the cottonwoods. We’re still in summer, but it’s not quite full blown any more. The thunderstorms last night were all monsoony (that’s summer) but there’s a cooler edge to the air. Maybe it’s a subtle smell – too subtle to notice, but working on the subconscious? And those bits of yellow.
Water in the Desert
My colleague Sean Olson illustrates in this morning’s paper his grasp of the connection between water and growth:
A request for water and sewer service for Westland DevCo’s southwest Albuquerque development was approved by the water board this week, even though it met heavy resistance from two city councilors.
Michael Cadigan and Isaac Benton on Wednesday advocated deferring the issue, citing concern about providing water service to a development that would mean more than 16,000 homes in an already crowded area.
“The last thing the city needs is 16,000 homes in the southwest part of town,” Cadigan said Thursday.
The 4,000-acre development, just southwest of Petroglyph National Monument, will include residential, industry, commercial retail and a town center.
Water board members Martin Heinrich, Deanna Archuleta, Alan Armijo, Teresa Córdova and Bruce Perlman voted to approve the water service agreement.
Coco has some additional thoughts.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
More Google Maps Play
Indeed, this is way easier than the way I’ve been doing it.
Embedding A Google Map
Via Google Maps Mania, word of a new tool to make it easier to embed a Google map in, for example, one’s blog. Let’s give it a try:
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
In pursuing the idea, Wingenter is entering a scientific-political minefield— the field of what is called “geo-engineering.”
The most widely discussed geo-engineering proposal, pushed by Lowell Wood of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, involves a fleet of jets spewing aerosols that would deflect the sun’s rays, cooling the planet in the process.
Other suggestions include launching giant mirrors into space to block some of the sun’s light.
One risk, said Ken Caldeira, an expert in the field at the Carnegie Institution in California, is that geo-engineering might be used as an excuse to avoid cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
“A world with a lot of greenhouse gases and a lot of geo-engineering might be better than a world with a lot greenhouse gases without geo-engineering,” he said.
Water in the Desert: Thorny Devil Edition
While we’re busy building pipelines to northern Nevada and figuring out how to desalinate brackish groundwater, a desert lizard called the “thorny devil” has opted for a simpler approach, according to a news piece in Science by Greg Miller:
They discovered that the hinges contain tubelike channels about the width of one or two human hairs, a good size for harnessing capillary forces to draw in water. In thorny devils, the network of hinges covers the entire body and appears to funnel water to an area near the corner of the lizards’ mouth, the researchers report in this month’s issue of Zoomorphology. They found a similar plumbing system in another rain-harvesting lizard, the Texas horned lizard (Phrynosoma cornutum), but not in seven related lizard species that don’t transport water.
Drought: The Supply and Demand Question
The latest drought monitor notes the current state of our reservoirs here in the western U.S.:
Despite the summer showers, many Western reservoirs remained unusually low, signaling ongoing hydrological drought. At the end of July, reservoir storage stood at 82 percent of average for this time of year in Arizona. Storage ranged from roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of average in several other Western states, including Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming.
For New Mexico, the number at the end of July was 78 percent.
Tracking the supply side of this question – how much precipitation has fallen from the sky – is relatively straightforward. For the water year (meaning since Oct. 1), the key snowpack-producing areas of New Mexico are above normal. So why are our reservoirs so low? Is it lingering effects of prior years’ droughts? Go back two years. Three years. Four years. Five years. Not really much different – normal or above normal in all the key places.
This highlights the thing that’s not so easy to track: the demand side of the equation.
Water in the Desert: Cocoposts Edition
Mike Campana seems to be channeling Coco in this post about Las Vegas:
It may be time to tie land use planning directly to water planning.
The subject is Las Vegas, which is running out of water. Or, more accurately, is running into more people. There’s plenty of water for fewer people. The subject is also of some relevance here.
Walkscore
Via the Google Maps Mania blog, the entertaining (and potentially useful) Walkscore web site. Input your address and they score your neighborhood’s walkability and tell you about bookstores and libraries nearby that you’d never heard of, and bistros that are closed.