I’m having a bad FOMO day today, watching John Orr’s Twitter feed from the Colorado River District’s fall seminar, being held today in Grand Junction: @R_EricKuhn : I speak in numbers. Let’s look at the hydrology of rivers. The history is quite important. I worked on the book with @jfleck. #crdas2019 #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification pic.twitter.com/A0IIKjq66A …
A guest post by Doug Kenney, University of Colorado In recent months, we’ve probably all encountered a dozen or more articles reflecting on the 150-year anniversary of the Colorado River voyage of John Wesley Powell. It’s a story coming from the tail end of an era when map-makers used to be among the most …
Continue reading ‘All I Want is an Accurate Colorado River Map’ »
I’m talking with University of New Mexico Water Resources Program students about the Colorado River this week, and pulling together some readings I had occasion to revisit the opening of The New Book: The boat ramp at Las Vegas Bay, once a shimmering recreation mecca on the shores of Lake Mead, now ends in a …
Continue reading ‘Las Vegas Bay: a path into the story of the Colorado River’ »
The Denver Post’s Bruce Finley took a deep dive in today’s paper into the idea of a Colorado River “grand bargain” that might trade off the Lower Basin’s right to make a “call” on the river if flows at Lee’s Ferry drop against an Upper Basin cap on future development: The grand bargain concept arose …
Continue reading ‘More talk of a Colorado River climate change “grand bargain”’ »
After Friday’s blog post and some intemperate tweeting about whether the Colorado River Drought Contingency plan cuts about to go into effect were voluntary or mandatory, a friend involved in the negotiations explained that they actually came up with a word for this: “vandatory”. The idea was that everything they all agreed to in DCP …
Walking across the University of New Mexico campus yesterday afternoon on my way to orientation for our incoming UNM Water Resources Program students, at precisely 3:10 pm MDT, a friend sent me a historic text message: “1089.4”. Translated from the native language of the Colorado River Water Nerd, “1089.4” means “The surface of Lake Mead …
By Eric Kuhn Last week I had the pleasure of exploring the banks the Colorado River near Moab, Utah with two of our most accomplished river scientists, Jack Schmidt (Utah State) and Vic Baker (U of Arizona), and hear a presentation by Dr. Baker on the science of studying past floods on the Colorado River …
Continue reading ‘Floods on the Colorado: If It Has Happened in the Past, It Can Happen’ »
Imperial Valley resident (and Imperial Irrigation District board member) Jim Hanks: The Salton Sea is a real place to me and I have always seen it as a lake, because that’s what it is. I also see it as hydrologically, geographically and morally connected to the Colorado River, and I appreciate the effort to place …
Continue reading ‘The Salton Sea: “treat it as a real place that impacts real people’s lives”’ »
Brad Udall, Doug Kenney, and I wrote a thing about the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan and what comes next: The plan is historic: It acknowledges that southwestern states need to make deep water use reductions – including a large share from agriculture, which uses over 70% of the supply – to prevent Colorado River …
Continue reading ‘Beyond the “Drought Contingency Plan” on the Colorado River’ »
tl;dr Folks in the Upper Colorado River Basin are only using ~60 percent of their Colorado River Compact allocation Use has been basically flat since 1990. It is not going up. A couple of weeks ago I got an email, with an attached spreadsheet, from my co-author Eric Kuhn. It was his distillation of data …