Lake Powell ended March 2022 at elevation 3,523, down 40 feet from a year ago. Lake Mead, which sees less fluctuation because of the (relatively) steady inflow from Powell upstream, ended March at elevation 1,061.5 – down just 23 feet from last year. “Launch Ramp Closed” is the least of our problems.
Eric Kuhn: One hundred years ago, we had some flexibility because the river was not very well-used. Today, not a drop of the Colorado River reaches the Gulf of California, so we don’t have that luxury. The way I look at it is: we legally allocated water based on an assumption that this river system …
The only lever we currently control is the demand lever. – Brad Udall, Stegner Colorado River Symposium, March 18, 2022 Colorado State University climate researcher Brad Udall poked again last week at a question he’s been thinking and speaking about for the past year – the knock-on effects of summer warming in the Colorado River …
Continue reading ‘Brad Udall on the Drying of the Colorado River Basin’ »
The most interesting news at this week’s University of Utah Stegner Symposium on the Colorado River Compact, past and future may be the news that we didn’t hear. It was an amazing gathering, bringing together pointy headed academics like me with most of the basin management leadership team from tribes, state and local agencies, and …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River Compact at 100; Lake Powell at 3,524.42’ »
I’d just turned my bike onto the old potash mine road out of Moab, down the Colorado River, this morning when a friend texted me a picture of a digital readout on a wall that I presume to be deep in the bowels of Glen Canyon Dam: WATER LEVEL 525 The “3” goes without saying, …
By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck The Colorado Commissions’ 8th Meeting Wednesday, March 15th, 1922, Phoenix, Arizona After a six-week break from the disappointing series of negotiating meetings that ended on January 31st in Washington, D.C., the commissioners from the seven U.S. Colorado River Basin states and the federal government reconvened for the group’s 8th …
The members of the Cattle and Horse Protective association of New Mexico, composed of men who are naturally deeply interested in a copious rainfall, believe that the Salton sea has given New Mexico a better climate. At any rate they want the matter investigated before Uncle Sam dykes up the Colorado river permanently. – Albuquerque …
Continue reading ‘When they thought the Salton Sea would bring New Mexico rain’ »
By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck As the Colorado River Compact’s negotiators got down to work a century ago, their lack of curiosity about how much water the river might be able to provide began to emerge. Colorado’s Delph Carpenter understood that he represented the interests of a headwaters state. Four major rivers, including the …
Eric Kuhn and John Fleck In complex multi-party negotiations like the Colorado River Compact process, it is rare that major progress or breakthroughs happen during one of general sessions. Instead, real progress is more often made during the more candid discussions between smaller groups of negotiators during breaks, after-dinner discussions, and occasionally sub-committees. Most of …
Tony Davis had a great story in the Daily Star over the weekend on the allure of desalination of ocean water as Arizona struggles with shrinking Colorado River supplies. Tony’s excellent work on this question susses out the problems: ocean desal is costly, like really costly ocean desal is energy intensive, like really energy intensive …
Continue reading ‘Desalination, Arizona, and magical thinking’ »