It is testimony to a lousy January and most of February that the spectacular snowstorm I drove home into over the weekend left the key watersheds that provide water to the Rio Grande and Colorado River still behind average for the year. The 9 inches of snow at my house was the most since December …
Continue reading ‘West’s snowpack improves, still not great’ »
Precipitation this winter at Crater Lake, in northern California southern Oregon, is a tad above normal. Snowpack is at record lows: On Friday morning, the snow level was at 32 inches, tying the Feb. 27 record for low snow. However, snow was falling Friday from a new storm system bringing rain to the Rogue Valley …
Continue reading ‘In the mountains of southern Oregon, what used to be snow turns to rain’ »
Brandon Loomis at the Arizona Republic, with an O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism through the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University, is trying to help us with this: Will Arizona and the Southwest continue to lead the nation in growth as the Colorado River dries? The first round of stories, with Republic photographer …
Continue reading ‘Arizona Republic tackling the Colorado River’ »
People monitoring snowpack and planning for the coming water year use two quite different definitions for the “Upper Colorado” basin/headwaters/watershed. One definition involves the watershed above Glenwood Springs, within the state of Colorado, where the branch of the big river once known as the “Grand” and then renamed the “Colorado” begins. (Bob in the comments …
Continue reading ‘A word of caution about what “Upper Colorado” means’ »
While the current snowpack numbers look lousy for Colorado River Basin runoff, a glimmer of hope for a late-season uptick in the latest Climate Prediction Center seasonal outlook. Green means “odd tipped toward wet”: I prefer to ignore, then the cognitive dissonance caused by this:
The new paper by Ben Cook and colleagues clarifying our understanding the risk of megadrought in the southwestern United States has rightly gotten a lot of attention. Combining paleo records and modeling of a changing climate under rising greenhouse gas scenarios, Cook and his colleagues have created some scary reading: [F]uture drought risk will likely …
Continue reading ‘Megadrought paper: message received, now what do we do?’ »
January was bad for snowpack and therefore spring runoff in the Colorado and Rio Grande basins. February has been worse. But we don’t use water at the basin scale, we use it one irrigation district and city at the time. Here I will attempt to sum up the current snowpack and water supply situation and …
Continue reading ‘Bad January, worse February in Colorado, Rio Grande basins’ »
We have a mismatch between 20th century plumbing and a 21st century climate. USGS hydrologist Paul Milly and colleagues in 2008 threw down a marker in a Science paper arguing that human interventions (intentional and not) have rendered a basic premise of human water operations invalid. The premise is “stationarity”, the idea that with data …
Continue reading ‘Stationarity and snowmelt in the Pacific Northwest’ »
January was dry in the water-producing parts of the Colorado River Basin. The official Feb. 1 forecast for the Colorado River above Lake Powell (the part of the Basin where all the water comes from) calls for just 80 percent of median April-July inflow. That’s a big drop from the Jan. 1 forecast, which called …
Continue reading ‘A lousy January in the Colorado River Basin’ »
The new monthly U.S. drought outlook, out this morning, has good news for New Mexico: But wait, I thought that idiot Fleck told us in Sunday’s paper that water managers were bracing for another dry year in New Mexico. What gives? This: The question of who might be hurt and who will avoid the pain …