Steve Scauzillo wrote last week about the Water Replenishment District of Southern California’s decision to invest $110 million in a new wastewater treatment plant, that they might use 21,000 acre feet now discharged to the ocean to recharge regional aquifers instead. Formed in the early 1960s, the WRD is the best example of one of …
I got an education this year in the nuances of global toxic materials regulatory regimes when I served on UNM graduate student Rachel Moore’s masters committee with Caroline Scruggs, a professor here at the university who’s worked for years in this area. (The paper on their work is here.) Caroline showed up in the Albuquerque …
Laura Paskus did a lovely job chronicling my post-newspaper-journalism (post-journalism?) life and thinking about water and the news, no longer the old nickname – “the harbinger of doom”: “I began to realize there was this other story about people not running out of water,” he says. Locally, for example, he points to a drop in Albuquerque’s …
A big thanks to J.R. Logan for this piece,which talks about the New Mexico acequia water governance model as an alternative to the “water’s for fighting over” narrative: Ledoux says sharing water has always been customary. Taking more than your fair share would have simply been wrong. This notion of sharing is not intrinsic to water …
Continue reading ‘Pushing back against the water conflict narrative’ »
The Rio Grande through Albuquerque has been rising for the last week or so, and is now about to make a good-sized jump in flow as water managers push some extra flows from storage behind upstream dams to encourage our beleaguered silvery minnow to spawn. From a notice sent out this afternoon by Mary Carlson …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico’s Rio Grande has lots of water in it right now’ »
I ended up by happy accident on a morning bike ride yesterday at Albuquerque’s sewage treatment plant outfall, which is the largest Rio Grande tributary between the Rio Chama and the U.S.-Texas-Mexico border. It’s just a short run from the culvert you see to the river, which is immediately behind where I was standing when …
Today’s long lead outlook from the Climate Prediction Center is enough to make a southwestern water manager long a second consecutive busted forecast*. With La Niña in the offing, the maps show creeping brown across the Four Corners states by August and not letting up until late spring of 2017: * Last winter’s forecast, for a …
Continue reading ‘A drying trend forecast for the Southwest’ »
Conference May 20 organized by my University of New Mexico water colleagues, especially Kerry Howe at UNM’s Center for Water and the Environment and Adrian Oglesby at the Utton Center: The drought has eased somewhat in New Mexico but might be returning, and uncertainties regarding our future remain. This 1-day conference will focus on federal …
Continue reading ‘Institutional Constraints to Water Management in New Mexico’ »
April and early May have been extraordinarily warm in parts of the western United States, leading to early snowmelt, according to the USDA’s first-week-of-May snowpack update: During April, Western snowpack dropped at record speed, according to data from the fifth and final 2016 forecast by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. “In …
Some remarkable news today out of the regular meeting of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District board: despite the nth* year of drought, the district’s farmers are likely to get a full irrigation season again this year, according to a report this afternoon from district hydrologist David Gensler. The forecast is for 60 percent runoff …