Lousy Rio Grande snowpack, but the runoff forecast is not as bad as I thought!

The January NRCS Rio Grande runoff forecast is lousy: a mid-point forecast of 65 percent of average at Otowi (upstream of Albuquerque) and 37 percent of average at San Marcial (downstream of Albuquerque). Based on the current snowpack, I expected worse. Forecaster Karl Wetlaufer, in the email distributing the numbers, explains: After a wet start …

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The Rio Grande cutthroat trout and the Endangered Species Act

The US Fish and Wildlife Service earlier this month (December 2024) once again declined to list the Rio Grande cutthroat trout as “endangered.” It’s a native species endangered (in the colloquial sense, not the legal sense) by both anthropogenic habitat changes (warm temperatures, less water, dams and stuff) and non-native immigrant species. USFWS identified non-native …

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MRGCD Board Approves Abiquiu Storage Deal

The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District Board this afternoon (Monday Oct. 14, 2024) approved an agreement among the District, the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, and the Bureau of Reclamation for temporary storage of District water in Abiquiu Reservoir on the Rio Chama while El Vado Reservoir is out of comission. This is a …

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Some data on alfalfa production

Update: Data here is from USDA, the “USGS” in the graphs is a typo in the code I used to generate them, which I’m too lazy to fix. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2024 estimate of alfalfa acreage in New Mexico, 130,000 acres, is the lowest it’s been since the 1950s. Acreage is down 55 …

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Finding Albuquerque’s Northeast Passage

I left for my Sunday morning bike ride today as early as an alarm, coffee, and breakfast would allow – to beat the heat. To structure the route, I set myself a puzzle: to ride from Albuquerque’s Old Town, paralleling the Rio Grande to the north, all the way up the valley to the north …

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Albuquerque’s Aquifer

  I’ve been a) Playing with Datawrapper as a tool for displaying data here on Inkstain, and b) Thinking about Albuquerque’s aquifer as bad summer river flows force us back onto groundwater (City #2, in the North Valley, is one of a quartet of groundwater monitoring wells drilled in the late ’50s as Albuquerque’s population …

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