The Augustin Plains Ranch project, New Mexico’s version of a trend toward meeting urban needs in the west by pumping rural groundwater in to cities, is taking another whack at winning state approval after losing resoundingly two years ago: A for-profit group hoping to pump New Mexico groundwater to the Rio Grande Valley and sell …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: moving groundwater in New Mexico’ »
From this morning’s newspaper, a column about a day with a research team studying the Cooper’s hawks that are making an increasingly comfortable living around my city: Cooper’s hawks are primarily woodland birds, and we have built an expansive urban forest across the Northeast Heights. The urban neighborhoods on the east side of the river …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere – the Cooper’s hawks of Albuquerque’ »
It’s monsoon season here in New Mexico, which means thunderstorms popping up here and there and, one hopes, everywhere around the state. In my blog stats, I notice that around this time of year I frequently get traffic for people searching for things like “how much rain did Albuquerque get today”. I’m writing this as …
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No Endangered Species Act litigation required for this project on the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico: The Rio Grande is recovering some native vegetation with irrigation water typically used by farmers. The International Boundary and Water Commission oversees water treaties between the United States and Mexico. But lately the agency has invested in river …
Continue reading ‘What water sharing and collaboration can look like’ »
Not a big fire, or a bad fire, at least not yet. Until humans arrived in force to change things, fires were common in those mountains. It’s a fire-adapted ecosystem. We’ve got to get used to the smoke.
Readers of this blog tend to be self-selected group (I’m looking at you, water nerds), so the fact the bulk of the West’s water goes to farming is not news to you. But my hunch (without any data) is that this is not well understood among the broader public. Which is who I write for …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: It’s the farms’ »
If I was trying to manage water in California, these maps would give me the heebie-jeebies. It’s from a new paper (AGU-walled) by Zion Klos and colleagues extending our knowledge of the shift from snow to rain in the high country of the western United States as a result of warming temperatures. Here’s why this …
Continue reading ‘In the West, what used to be snow, falling as rain’ »
Summer rains aren’t a big part of the Colorado River Basin’s water supply story, but they don’t hurt. So here’s an optimistic map, published this morning by the Climate Prediction Center: The more interesting maps are the long term ones: You can see that for the lower part of the Colorado River Basin (where I …