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.

It’s red sidewalk crack poppy season in Albuquerque

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Red poppies growing in a narrow crack between a curb and sidewalk.

Papaver rhoeas – the common red sidewalk crack poppy.

It’s red sidewalk crack poppy season in Albuquerque.

It’s a weird ecological niche, but Papaver rhoeas, the common corn poppy (it has a bunch of other names) seems to have mastered the sidewalk cracks in my neighborhood.

Sciency people call it an archeophyte, a species that arose in its modern form in an evolutionary dance with humans. It occupies one of those fun biological spaces that challenges our notion of “natural.” Our ancestors started plowing and planting cereal crops, and the poppy hopped onto the agrarian train. Its ability to scatter lots of seeds, which can hang around for a long time waiting for the right opportunity to sprout; its fondness for disturbed soil and open, sunny fields, and such. The rapid selection pressure ramped up its evolutionary adaptive response. One thing I read even suggested that it shifts its germination and flower patterns to local climate and cropping.

We’ve got a few this year in a flower bed out front that we dug up and replanted over the winter – disturbed earth! There’s a house over by the park that has a nice unintentional bed of them in its front yard.

And they’re everywhere right now in our sidewalk cracks.

New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande: Not Dry Yet!

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Crews monitoring New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande reported yesterday (April 14, 2025) that the river’s still flowing past the San Marcial railroad bridge. Just downstream of the bridge, the USGS gage dropped to zero flow yesterday morning. We’re at the pivotal moment when the fact that you have to go out and look, and finding a ribbon of continuous water, however hard to measure with a gage – the river is still flowing – counts as news.

The Rio Grande through central New Mexico will begin drying soon from the bottom up, as the meager flows coming in from upstream disappear:

  • into a web of canals that distribute the water across its former flood plain
  • into the ground to fill the space left behind by groundwater pumping by cities and domestic well users
  • into the air as the trees along its length suck up its moisture
  • and then into the desert sands around San Marcial.

River drying in May is rare and bad. The fact that the river’s on the brink of beginning to dry in mid-April is worse.

Water for irrigators

Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District water operations manager Anne Marken reported at yesterday’s board meeting on the crazy institutional hydrograph we’re now seeing. Flows are up for now on the Rio Chama, but that extra water won’t be making its way down to the Middle Valley right away. Instead, it’s being stored for use later in the year by the Middle Rio Grande Pueblos, which have senior rights under the 1928 legislation that provided federal funding to create the District works. There’s continuing tension over this, because storing more water to meet legal obligations to the Pueblos (which have senior water rights) means less water for non-Indian irrigators. Lots of cryptic signalling about this debate at yesterday’s MRGCD meeting, but little explicit discussion of the hydrologic, economic, social and cultural tradeoffs involved. This is the kind of tough stuff that has to be dealt with in coping with dry years.

Storage in Abiquiu is going up, and the Bureau of Reclamation is adding a little bit of water to El Vado, the busted dam on the Rio Chama that can hold a little bit of water despite its shortcomings. I’m not privy to the internal accounting, but this appears to be Pueblo “prior and paramount” water.

Cochiti releases

Also at yesterday’s meeting, MRGCD leadership was unusually vocal about frustration with the way the Corps of Engineers has been managing Cochiti Dam releases – lots of ups and downs that have made it hard to manage diversions for irrigators, as district chief Jason Casuga explained in unusually blunt terms.

As I said, this is the kind of tough stuff that has to be dealt with in coping with dry years.

The Bureau of Reclamation has money for some supplemental environmental flow water water this year, imported San Juan-Chama Project water. But there’s very little of that. (The e-flow water helps the irrigators – the fish don’t consume it!)

With no water in storage from previous years, Middle Valley irrigators, as we’ve said before, will have a very water-short year this year. What we’re seeing right now may be the most we see this year.

Marken:

So I wish I had better news, but I I think this could be one of the most challenging irrigation seasons the Middle Valley has experienced in recent history. And you know, as always, I encourage everyone to pray for rain.

 

New Mexico’s incredible shrinking Rio Grande

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Graph of daily streamflow at the Rio Grande at Albuquerque USGS gage from 1965 to present, showing 2025 flows in blue, which decline through April—indicating an unusually low and diminishing spring runoff. Historical medians are shown for 1981–2000 (red), 2001–present (purple), and the full record (dashed green), with shaded percentile ranges (90th–10th in blue, 70th–30th in green). Data by USGS, analysis by John Fleck, Utton Center.

Shrinking river

My Utton Center colleague Rin Tara and I spent the day out in the field yesterday, a visit to River Mile 60 at the bottom end of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande.

(Disclosure: We took bikes, but “out in the field” sounds fancier than “on a bike ride.”)

Photo of the Rio Grande in New Mexico during low flow conditions, showing a narrow, shallow stream winding through exposed sandbars and surrounded by dry, leafless vegetation under a clear blue sky.

Shrinking when it should be growing.

The trip was fodder for a piece I’m working on looking at the US Bureau of Reclamation’s Middle Rio Grande river maintenance program carried out under the Flood Control Acts of 1948 and ‘50. Or possibly it’s a piece about the flooding in the 1920s that doomed the community of San Marcial. Or maybe its a piece about the remarkable geomorphology of a high sediment load river doing river things.

Or maybe it’s just a piece about a breathtaking expanse of desert with a struggling river valley flowing through its heart. Probably all of those things, which is why, dear readers, that you may not see the piece for a while.

The river, as defined by the presence of water, was barely there. It’s a weird stretch where sediment built up when it was the delta for the high stands of Elephant Butte Reservoir, a quaint reminder of when we had a lot of water. The river is now cutting back down through the debris, and the whole area is a mess from a human water management perspective.

From the river’s perspective? Meh, it’s just a river doing river things.

At a time when flows should be rising as a result of melting snow, they are declining as a result of the absence of melting snow. We cut the bike ride shorter than I had planned, because it was hot and I am old. But I’ll be back. It’s a lovely spot, and I have to figure out what to write.

Quoting Amber Wutich

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Nowadays, almost no one’s experience of water insecurity is dependent on the physical availability of water in their local environment.

What determines how much water we have is the kinds of infrastructure we build, the economies that we built to manage the water, the values we put on the water, and so if we want to address problems of water insecurity, we have to start with the human parts of the system and work in concert with the hydrology and the biophysical parts of the system.

– Amber Wutich