On a call this morning, Smart River Person made a really simple point that goes to the heart of my frustration about our current discussions about water shortfalls on the Rio Grande. The discourse involves blaming – mostly downstream people, in this case Elephant Butte Reservoir users, blaming upstream people for mismanaging the river. You …
Continue reading ‘“This is climate change stealing your water.”’ »
We’re having a moment right now on central New Mexico’s Rio Grande as we gird for a drying river through the Albuquerque reach for the first time since 1983. Expect drying to first start showing up below the Rio Bravo bridge sometime in July, between the bridge and the Albuquerque wastewater treatment plant, where the …
Continue reading ‘What’s next on New Mexico’s Rio Grande – bearing witness to a drying river’ »
Mary Harner and I spent a good deal of time this morning trying to get our bearings walking along the west bank of Albuquerque’s Rio Grande near a place we call “the oxbow”. Mary, a friend and colleague from the University of Nebraska at Kearney, has been working on a delightful river research project for …
Continue reading ‘In a dry year, growing a new patch of Rio Grande Bosque’ »
With flows in the Rio Grande dropping rapidly, Albuquerque will stop diverting drinking water from the river Friday, switching to its groundwater wells for municipal supply. This is the second year in a row that dry conditions have so depleted the river’s flow that the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority had to shut down …
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I got an email this morning from a friend watching as the bottom begins to drop out of the Rio Grande’s flow at a place called Otowi, north of Albuquerque. When Otowi drops, the river here in Albuquerque soon follows – one of those upstream/downstream things. It’s been a weird year on our river – …
Continue reading ‘Nervously watching New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande’ »
The 1928 report they call “Burkholder’s Bible” – more formally “A Plan For Flood Control, Drainage and Irrigation of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy Project” – must be treated as one of modern Albuquerque’s founding texts. Like any such text, it rewards careful reading. Also in the manner of such texts, the more you read …
Continue reading ‘“Burkholder’s Bible” – one of Albuquerque’s founding texts’ »
Following what NRCS forecaster Angus Goodbody describes as “an exceptionally dry April”, our anticipated Rio Grande runoff into New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande valley (meaning the flow at the Otowi gauge) is down 100,000 acre feet from a month ago. That’s about 44 percent of the 30-year mean. Importantly, April was really our last chance …
Continue reading ‘Rio Grande forecast drops another 100,000 acre feet’ »
I mostly hate log scale in graphs I use for broad communication purposes. It’s just not intuitive. But I’ve made the switch for this year’s Rio Grande, because the flows are so low that we need the log scale, because at really low flows small changes become big, if that makes any sense. The difference …
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My friend and colleague Becky Bixby (UNM biologist, associate director of the UNM Water Resources Program) gave a great talk recently about her work on the diatoms – little light-eating algae – on the margins of our river. (first 10-ish minutes is Becky)
An email exchange with a friend who helps manage New Mexico’s water led to the graph above, my first stab at a visualization to try to show the accumulation of two bad years’ flow on the Rio Grande. Not quite sure this does all the work yet that I need of it, but perhaps worth …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico’s Rio Grande: Last year bad, this year worse’ »