Lauren Villagran’s story in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal about the impact of the Boxing Day blizzard on New Mexico dairies is a reminder of the single most important trend in New Mexico agriculture in the last few decades – the remarkable growth of the state’s dairy industry. Some numbers on that below, but it reminded me …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico population (cattle v. people) through history’ »
With snow on the mountains to the north, the preliminary forecast circulated yesterday by the Natural Resources Conservation Service calls for 11 percent above average flow on the Rio Grande through central New Mexico into Elephant Butte reservoir. This is early in the season, so there are still huge error bars on the numbers, with …
Continue reading ‘Preliminary forecast for above average flow on New Mexico’s Rio Grande’ »
My California water friends are breathing a tiny bit easier, as an El Niño-fueled jet stream queues up a series of storms for the parched state. But the latest forecast models suggest the Colorado River Basin is going to have to wait its turn. The invaluable Daniel Swain wrote a couple of days ago about …
Continue reading ‘California wetting up, Colorado Basin will have to wait’ »
We got 12.86 inches of precipitation in 2015 (32.66 cm) at the Heineman-Fleck house in Albuquerque. Average going back to 2000 is 9.72, which qualifies by the arbitrary 10 inch mark as a desert.
Elephant Butte Reservoir, the largest on the Rio Grande, will end 2015 with roughly 322,000 acre feet of water, or about 16 percent full. That’s up from 11.5 percent last year at this time: Elephant Butte provides water, primarily for irrigation, for southern New Mexico, Texas, and northern Mexico. When Elephant Butte is short, as …
When I was in newspaper journalism, I always viewed the holiday season as a target of opportunity. Papers were relatively fat, propped up by holiday ad content, and news was thin, so editors were desperate for copy. As the end of the year approached, I’d queue up story ideas, knowing that it was a chance …
New Mexico forest acreage cleared to protect the state’s watersheds and water supply tripled this year: The Rio Grande Water Fund was started in July 2014. In conjunction with its 45 investor partners, the water fund thinned 10,130 acres of forest during its first year. That’s up from an average of 3,000 acres per year …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico forest restoration acreage rising’ »
It snowed overnight in Albuquerque.
Total water use in Albuquerque for the first 11 months of 2015 is down 6 percent from the same period in 2014, according to the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority’s latest pumping and diversions report. Indoor use (as measured indirectly by comparing this year’s sewage treatment plant outfall to last year’s) is essentially unchanged, …
With fall semester over yesterday, I called “faculty prerogative” and went out with Lissa for a weekday afternoon walk by the Rio Grande. I’m just an adjunct, but I’m trying to model the behaviors of my more distinguished university colleagues, and one of them is the rhythm of the academic calendar. Finals week is still …
Continue reading ‘The institutional hydrograph: New Mexico’s Rio Grande in December’ »