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 …
Via Laura Gersony at Circle of Blue, a look at the work of Julia Bernal, leader of the Pueblo Action Alliance and a really interesting thinker on land and water here in the Southwest: She is an advocate of the Land Back movement, which calls on the U.S. government to allow Indigenous people to continue …
Continue reading ‘“We can’t have land back without water back.” – Julia Bernal’ »
Mary Harner and I tagged along yesterday morning out in the Rio Grande Oxbow with Wes Noe, a UNM Water Resources Program/Community and Regional Planning student who is doing his masters project at field sites there. Loyal readers will remember remember my travels with Mary, a University of Nebraska colleague studying the Rio Grande. Wes …
A robust July monsoon has allayed our worst fears about central New Mexico’s Rio Grande. Is it really a “monsoon”? Back in the days when my paid gig was writing newspaper stories, I loved writing about the monsoon, and every time I did I would get helpful feedback from readers anxious to explain that I …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico’s Rio Grande, bailed out by an impressive monsoon’ »
A most Albuquerque summer morning for a bike ride: Muggy monsoon dewpoint Muddy storm-fed Rio Grande The smell of green chiles roasting, early, in the El Super parking lot This lone green chile in the eastbound bike lane over the Rio Grande
Between the wildfire smoke and two important meetings for which I am unprepared, I intended to stick to a quick indoor Zwift bike ride this morning before getting on with my day. Until I checked the gauges. 57 cubic feet per second. It’s a morning ritual, the little iPhone app while I’m curled up in …
Holed up in a UNM Water Resources Program conference room, my book co-author Bob Berrens and I spent an afternoon last week trying to make sense of the graph above. The 1920 U.S. Census description of the greater Albuquerque area (Bernalillo County) captures a remarkable moment in our city’s history. We were a community of …
Continue reading ‘Bernalillo County Agriculture, a Very Brief History’ »