River Beat: Lake Powell’s Decline From Space
NASA’s Landsat 7 captured this remarkable image of Lake Powell’s decline, as seen from space:
Archive of entries posted on May 2010
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Kirtland Fuel Spill Update
From this morning’s paper, an update on the Kirtland Air Force Base jet fuel spill (sub/ad req.): State regulators on Friday denied the Air Force a requested 45-day extension on a deadline to turn in plans to deal with a jet fuel spill threatening Albuquerque groundwater. “Urgent action needs to be taken to address this …
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California Über Alles
I had breakfast this morning with a bunch of California expats. It’s a weird label. We don’t normally think of ourselves that way. But I’ve been feeling nostalgic about the land of my birth lately. Not sure why, but it probably has something to do with seeing palm trees, citrus groves and bougainvillea last month …
River Beat: It Could Be Worse
I guess the best you can say about the updated forecast for Colorado River flows for the rest of the 2010 water year is that it could have been worse. A wet April in the northern reaches of the Colorado River basin has pushed the Lake Powell inflow forecast, out today from the Kevin Werner …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Jet Fuel Leak
Which spill to cover? Some environmental journalism tradecraft here. There is a nagging problem for reporters who cover contamination problems. As a society, we spill nasty shit all the time, in all sorts of places, from the sheen of oil and lead wheel weight residues on our streets to the nitrates beneath dairies to the …
On the subtleties of runoff
I took a quick dash out to see the Rio Grande yesterday at lunch. It’s easy to sit in my office and call and surf and think about water in the abstract, but it’s important to go out and see it as often as I can. It’ s been up and down a bit over …
G.K. Gilbert and the changing Great Salt Lake
One of my favorite stories of early western water science is the clever way geologist G.K. Gilbert, in the 19th century, used the rise and fall of the Great Salt Lake as a proxy for decadal-scale climate variability. Here’s how I told the story in my book: The lake has no outlent, and so the only …
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River Beat: Why Is Lake Mead Dropping?
Easy answer to the question asked in the title of this post, right? The last decade is the driest 10-year stretch since record keeping began on the Colorado River. Of course Lake Mead has dropped because of “drought”, right? No. During that entire time, thanks to upstream storage and the fact that Upper Basin consumption …