The caption of the picture above is a bit of a fib, but it was true when I wrote it. I had to click through on the picture’s geotag to figure out that it was taken where the Sausal Drain connects to the Jaral Lateral near Belen in Valencia County, New Mexico. Not exactly lost, …
We’re entering the end-of-year water accounting phase of the Rio Grande hydrograph in central New Mexico, with big flows coming out of the Rio Chama, the largest tributary in this stretch of our “big” river. As I’ve written before, relatively higher December flows are a weird artifact of water management rules, which do accounting on …
Continue reading ‘Big flows on central New Mexico Rio Grande as feds move water’ »
One of the conceptual riddles Bob Berrens and I are working through in the new book we’re pursuing on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande, and the work surrounding it, is the ecosystem goods and services across our valley floor provided by the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s web of irrigation ditches. Where once we had …
Continue reading ‘On the ecosystem benefits of irrigation systems’ »
I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time the last few weeks pointing and clicking on the new OpenET project’s “data explorer”. Using satellite data and magical algorithms, OpenET allows me to look at an arbitrary bit of land and retrieve an estimate of the amount of “evapotranspiration” – essentially outdoor water use – for …
Per Dan McKay and Theresa Davis at the Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico State Engineer John D’Antonio is stepping down. In doing so, he was sharply critical of New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s decision to not ask the New Mexico legislature for increased funding for his depleted department despite booming state revenue: [H]e cited a …
Peña Blanca, NM – The Cochiti Main, winding through the village of Peña Blanca, was still flowing Saturday morning with some of the last of this year’s irrigation water destined for farms to the south. I’m a bit jammed up in my effort to return to writing (see below for the “some personal news” portion …
Getting ready for class class discussion this afternoon about “drought” (“I get to see my students in person!” he exclaimed nervously.), I had occasion to check the latest Climate Prediction Center long lead forecast. It’s a few weeks old, but I don’t expect it’ll have changed much. The brownest blob captures both river basins I …
I had the joy of sharing a goofy group text thread yesterday evening with a couple of friends exchanging pictures of the round rocks we each collected yesterday morning on a field trip to see the plumbing of the San Juan-Chama Project, which diverts Colorado River Basin water beneath the continental divide to bring drinking …
This morning’s operations missive from the federal-state-local Middle Rio Grande operations group (by “Middle” here we mean central New Mexico) notes a release of ~100 cubic feet per second of imported San Juan-Chama Project water for environmental flows, an effort to help the struggling Rio Grande silvery minnow. SJC water is removed from the Colorado …
I’ve been thrashing about this year thinking about ways of visualizing and measuring how dry this year has been on my home river, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque. Above is my latest stab at it. A flow of 100 cubic feet per second at the USGS gage at Albuquerque’s Route 66 bridge in the middle …