I’ll be yammering in public Thursday in Albuquerque, y’all should come! What Did We Know and When Did We Know It: How Much Water Does the Colorado River Really Have? In retrospect, it is clear that the 1922 Colorado River Compact was negotiated during a historically wet period, and that as a result the agreement …
With an underwhelming snowpack right now, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s initial 2018 forecast (pdf here) projects combined storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two primary reservoirs on the Colorado River, will drop to 21.7 million acre feet by the end of 2018. That would be the lowest Mead/Powell combined year end storage …
Continue reading ‘Initial forecast: Lakes Mead and Powell headed for record low in 2018’ »
Eric Kuhn* of the Colorado River District wrote an interesting memo (pdf here) for his board’s meeting next week that lays out the options and reasoning behind current discussions about whether federal legislation will be needed to implement Colorado River Basin drought plans. The “Law of the River”, which governs allocation, distribution, and management of …
Continue reading ‘On the need for federal legislation to implement Colorado River drought plans’ »
At yesterday’s monthly Colorado Basin River Forecast Center briefing, Greg Smith noted, by way of analogy, the winter of 1976-77. Smith explained that he wasn’t forecasting – the fact that the evolution of this year’s forecast is similar to 1976-77 doesn’t mean that the rest of this year will be like that year, or that …
Continue reading ‘What happened in the Colorado River Basin in the winter of 1976-77?’ »
The “use it or lose it” problem in western water happens when water users who conserve are penalized by having the saved water simply go to another user. A series of policy innovations over the last decade to overcome this problem are showing up right now in a big way in Lake Mead. In all, …
Continue reading ‘Overcoming “use it or lose it” on the Colorado River’ »
Let’s look at the new Colorado Basin River Forecast Center graphic of projected runoff into Lake Powell, shall we? The folks at CBRFC has done a lovely update of their graphical presentation. The story it’s telling right now – not so lovely. Let’s take this step by step. First, the green lines in the middle …
Continue reading ‘A brief tutorial in how bad the Colorado River Basin snowpack is right now’ »
Lake Mead ends 2017 at elevation 1,082.5, almost two feet above last year at this time. Lake Powell ends the year at 3,623, up more than 20 feet from a year ago. Combined storage in the two primary Colorado River reservoirs ends the year up more than 2 million acre feet. This is in part …
In the summer of 1931, as the Bureau of Reclamation was launching work on Hoover Dam, flows on the Colorado River dropped to what, at the time, were low flows unprecedented in the few decades’ records on the river. In retrospect it should have been a clue that there was not going to reliably be …
Continue reading ‘Managing the Colorado River to use less, rather than take more’ »
LAS VEGAS, NV – When I stopped at Boulder Harbor on Lake Mead Tuesday morning as I drove into Las Vegas, I saw this field of salt cedar taking hold on what had been a mud flat left by Mead’s declining water levels. It’s a clumsy metaphor for what happens when you get comfortable with …
Continue reading ‘Acting like the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan is Done’ »
LAS VEGAS, NV – “Dry for Decades,” the tourist placard at Hoover Dam’s Nevada spillway says. “The last time the waters of the Colorado River flowed through this spillway was in 1983.” On my way to this year’s annual meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association, I spent some time yesterday at Hoover Dam …
Continue reading ‘Lake Mead: 61 percent empty or 39 percent full?’ »