Seventeen of the last 20 years have had below-average runoff at Otowi (north-central New Mexico) on the Rio Grande: That’s from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s 2015 Annual Operating Plan presentation, done in Albuquerque last week. “Average” is the 1895-2014 mean.
Michael Wines in Monday’s New York Times: The perils of drought are on ample display along the Rio Grande, where a rising thirst has tested farmers, fueled environmental battles over vanishing fish and pushed a water-rights dispute between Texas and New Mexico to the Supreme Court. But you can also see glimmers of hope. Albuquerque, …
Continue reading ‘On the Rio Grande drought, not exactly optimism, but not pessimism either’ »
update: The preliminary human-in-the-loop forecast is substantially better than the automated one, at 55 percent. But still terrible. previously: The preliminary Rio Grande forecast for April 1 is just 33 percent of the 1981-2000 average, a dramatic reduction since the March 1 forecast that shows just how abysmally warm and dry the month of March …
Continue reading ‘Preliminary Rio Grande runoff: 55 percent through Central New Mexico’ »
According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, warm February weather meant the earliest runoff in the 40-plus year history of the San Juan-Chama Project, which brings water from southern Colorado to the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. But “early” does not translate to “a lot of water”. San Juan-Chama Project contractors, the largest of …
Continue reading ‘San Juan-Chama forecast: looks like a second year of shortfall’ »
My former newspaper colleague Win Quigley came over to the UNM Water Resources Program offices the other day to talk to Bruce Thomson and I about central New Mexico’s water problems and the virtue (or inevitability) of muddling through: “We know how to do this. Humans are adaptable,” Fleck said. “When people have less water, …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico water policy: on muddling through’ »
There’s a famous 1969 photo by Ernst Haas of Route 66 in Albuquerque, scrubbed by a summer rain, looking east toward the mountains. I’m not smart enough to have been imitating, so this isn’t homage. But if you click on the link (I’m not going to embed the image, respect for copyright) you can see …
Would I be right to guess that this is the first time tree rings have been in the Rolling Stone? “It was like looking through a telescope into the future to see how forests would respond, and it felt awful,” Williams says. “The result was totally unimaginable: wildfires, bark beetles, a huge reduction in forest …
There is a natural desire in water-short communities to capture and use stormwater. But a brewing feud between the state of New Mexico and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is a reminder that tweaking the stormwater management system is not without consequences, because the water you’re capturing would otherwise be going somewhere and doing something. …
Continue reading ‘A reminder that stormwater isn’t free water’ »
The New Mexico legislature is considering a bill this year that would make it easier for farmers to maintain their “agricultural” designation, for property tax purposes, during drought. This is important for preservation of rural agricultural ways of life, because ag land taxes are cheaper than land otherwise labeled (“residential”, for example). For this reason, …
The Albuquerque fairgrounds flea market is the place for hats.