Archive of entries posted on August 2011

The Law of the River as a model for dealing with the loss of stationarity

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Climate change and the resulting changes in rivers flows pose significant problems for transboundary water management agreements. But a new paper by Heather Cooley and Peter Gleick at the Pacific Institute finds a hopeful model in recent tweaks adding flexibility in the face of drought to the “Law of the River” governing distribution of water …

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My water policy nightmare

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I had a really scary dream this morning. My memory is vague, but I was somehow involved in making decisions about how to allocate the water in a big river among various users. But we didn’t have good data on how much water the river actually held. Terrifying.

Some call it “maize”

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On my way home from a bike ride this afternoon, I stopped by the vendor selling sweet Moriarty corn out of her pickup truck on old Route 66 just west of Tijeras Canyon: I could only fit three in my shirt pockets, which will not be enough to get my family through the winter.

On Colorado River failure modes

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One of my new tricks when looking at western water problems is to pose the question: “What is the failure mode?” It’s clear that on many scales, both temporal and geographic, we’ve got supply-demand imbalances. It’s easy to point that out and call the system unsustainable, to point out that we’re headed for a crash. …

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Stuff I wrote elsewhere: on the power of moving water

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The results of a couple of trips north last week into the flood zone in the canyons below the watersheds burned by the Las Conchas fire (sub/ad req): In Cochiti Canyon, a New Mexico Environment Department team estimated the Aug. 21 flow that caused the first round of damage at Dixon’s at 12,000 cubic feet …

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On the relevance of paleoclimate studies

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As Irene prepares to drop by and visit our eastern neighbors, Kevin Anchukaitis points to this: Evidence of historical landfalling hurricanes and prehistoric storms has been recovered from backbarrier environments in the New York City area. Overwash deposits correlate with landfalls of the most intense documented hurricanes in the area, including the hurricanes of 1893, …

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