Yes, a good snowpack helped us this year in the Colorado River. But the numbers are clear – reductions in water use made a far larger contribution to the good news on the river this year. This week’s official Bureau of Reclamation declaration that we won’t have a 2018 Colorado River shortage got a lot …
Continue reading ‘On the Colorado, the lowest water use in 25 years’ »
Background here.
Lauren Steely, late of the Bren School, did a neat analysis a few days ago to help visualize Oroville Dam inflow data. She’s using R’s joyplot tool, which is all the rage these days as a new day to line up and visualize variability in datasets that have repeating patterns. Like, for example, the annual hydrograph on …
Continue reading ‘That time we built a dam in Glen Canyon’ »
Lawyers have the coolest language. Consider the doctrine of prior appropriation. “Beneficial use,” the drafters of the New Mexico constitution explained, “shall be the basis, the measure and the limit of the right to the use of water.” It felt like poetry the first time I heard the New Mexico state engineer roll it out …
Annemarie Lewis did a great job of helping Amy McCoy and I talk about the governance of the Colorado River in this American Rivers podcast. My favorite part starts around the 19:00 when Annemarie asks both of us what “success” might look like. Next week, in Part II, we talk about solutions.
With a Senate Hearing tomorrow and a meeting of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District Thursday, we’re starting to see the public rollout of a Colorado River management agreement between the United States and Mexico that now looks like it’s on track to be signed within the next few months. The biggest clue that this could really …
Continue reading ‘U.S.-Mexico Colorado River deal is close’ »
When we think today about Arizona’s water problems, we imagine large lawns in sprawling suburbs in and around Phoenix, golf courses, and “misters”—those devices that fritter away water into the hot desert air to cool the customers eating at outdoor restaurants in the Valley of the Sun. Me, in Water is For Fighting Over Lissa …
Forecast flow through the Azotea Tunnel, which provides New Mexico’s San Juan-Chama Project supplies of Colorado River water to Albuquerque and central New Mexico, are forecast to be 152,000 acre feet for the 2016-17 water year, the highest flows of the 21st century.
Audubon has an excellent new report on risks to birds, and all that go with them, along the rivers and arid landscape lakes across western North America. Lots there, but I think this bit is especially important: Without reform, today’s water management framework could lead to severe water shortages to large numbers of people and …
One suggested short term tool to deal with the shrinking Salton Sea is to continue putting in more water. New research suggests that, for fish and birds, it won’t help. “Mitigation water” is jargon for extra water currently diverted to the Salton Sea to make up for reduced agricultural runoff as efficiency improvements. (It’s hairy …
Continue reading ‘Salton Sea fish, birds, in jeopardy even with more mitigation water’ »