“the valley breathing in”
The first water is heading down the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s Albuquerque Main toward town. “I love this time of year,” an MRGCD guy told me years ago. “You can feel the valley breathing in.”
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Deadpool Diaries: Colorado River report card
With the March 24-month study out, a status report on the Colorado River Basin’s critical numbers. I’ve added the “minimum probable” forecast this time to help better understand the risk profile. In brief, water users continue to take more water out of Lake Mead than is flowing in. Most Probable Lake Mead million acre feet …
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Does 2023’s “cabin crusher” of a snowpack herald a return of California’s Tulare Lake?
It is easy to forget that California’s Tulare Lake, in the southern San Joaquin Valley, once competed with Lake Cahuilla (the “Salton Sea”) for the title of “largest lake west of the Mississippi”. We drained it. We farm it. But as Erica Gies happily reminds us at every opportunity, water is a formidable adversary if …
Deadpool Diaries: A report card on our response to inconvenient science
A Colorado River report card Lake Mead Water Year 2023, based on the most recent Bureau of Reclamation 24-month study Lake Mead million acre feet percent full Start of WY2023 7.328 28.08% End of WY2023 6.508 24.93% gain(loss) (0.820) -3.14% Current forecast U.S. Lower Basin water use state projected use in maf percent of …
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It’s good to always keep your headlight charged.
Inkstain at Twenty
tl;dr I started this blog 20 years ago today. I used it to learn to write. Why? This blog started 20 years ago today (March 9, 2003) thus: I have too many blogs already – Advogato, the Nuke Beat, my ABQJournal musings. Starting another seems a bit of overkill. They all have their roots elsewhere …
Inching toward El Niño
Today’s ENSO outlook (El Niño Southern Oscillation) suggests a consensus among “the models” that the odds are tipping toward an El Niño for the coming summer and fall. The humans in the loop are more bearish: The most recent IRI plume favors ENSO-neutral to continue through the spring, with El Niño forming during summer 2023 …
On Gardens
Utopian text Every garden is a utopian text, expressing the desire for a more perfect world as well as an implicit critique of the less-lovely world in which it is located. – Naomi Jacobs, Consuming Beauty: The Urban Garden as Ambiguous Utopia Claude Monet, no doubt speaking in French and so shared here translated prosaically …
March 1 runoff forecasts are solid
With a solid snowpack in all of my rivers, we’ve got a pair of solid March 1 forecasts for 2023 runoff. Rio Grande 102 percent at Otowi, the main forecast point for water entering New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley. Implications: While we don’t have a formal Annual Operating Plan for the Albuquerque Bernalillo County …
Deadpool Diaries: “the law is an ass”
Apologies, no tl;dr is possible. To borrow from Blaise Pascal, I would have written a shorter blog post, but I did not have the time. On a bike ride a week ago I took a favorite “long cut” (the slow ways are mostly better, best to not be in a hurry) through downtown …