Rio Grande flow dropped this week through Albuquerque, at a time when we should expect it to be rising with the accelerating melt of an unusually large snowmelt. What’s up with that? The answer (see below, I’m can’t figure out how to tl;dr this) is a case study in the stuff we’re trying to explain …
Continue reading ‘On Cochiti dam and the notion of “flooding”’ »
We have a chance this year to watch a fascinating intersection of climate-change driven changes in the Rio Grande through Albuquerque as filtered through both physical infrastructure and what we call the “institutional hydrograph”. The tl;dr Dust on snow is likely to accelerate Rio Grande headwaters snowmelt, meaning all that stored water comes off earlier. …
Rep. Melanie Stansbury, my congresswoman, is throwing her considerable political and water policy clout behind efforts to poke the U.S. Air Force into action on its malingering fuel spill on Albuquerque’s south side. Dani Prokop had a nice overview of the issues this morning in Source NM: Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) called Tuesday for the …
There’s a weird bench at the edge of a lovely little ten acre patch of desert sand hill scrub a ten minute walk from my office at the UNM School of Law. The path circles the edge of the university’s north golf course, which is green and lovely in its pumped-groundwater way. The path (It’s …
Continue reading ‘Ribbons of green and the sand hills beyond’ »
But when worlds collideSaid George Pal to his brideI’m gonna give you some terrible thrills – Richard O’Brien, Science Fiction Double Feature
After a couple of years of setback, the aquifer underneath the University of New Mexico neighorhood is rising again. The spring measurement shows that it’s risen three feet since last year around this time. The annual variability (the graph’s ups and downs) are the result of regional groundwater pumping for our municipal supply – more …
Continue reading ‘Albuquerque’s aquifer recovery seems to be returning’ »
In the early 1990s, a group of New Mexico scientists set up experimental plots at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge on the Rio Grande south of Albuquerque for in an effort to determine what might happen when water was reintroduced to the flood-starved woods flanking the river. Their description of what happened is …
Continue reading ‘Bosque overbanking as the Rio Grande rises’ »
My friend Scot and I rode north on yesterday’s bike ride to see the Corrales Siphon pumps. Built in the 1930s, the siphon for nearly a century carried water beneath the Rio Grande to irrigate a thousand acres of land on the west side of the river at the northern end of the Albuquerque …
Continue reading ‘Thick places, infrastructural inversions, and the gift of ideas’ »
The Rio Grande through central New Mexico is up. Yesterday’s daily average flow, 3,360 cubic feet per second, is the highest for that date since 1993. For Albuquerque’s river nerds, “overbanking” is an important cultural phenomenon. The Bureau of Reclamation’s Middle Rio Grande Project in the 1950s narrowed and channelized the river through our valley, …
Continue reading ‘Overbanking on Albuquerque’s Middle Rio Grande’ »
Ryan Boetel at the Albuquerque Journal has the latest in the morning paper on the big flows on the Rio Jemez, a Rio Grande tributary north of Albuquerque. For non-Albuquerque readers, the Jemez flows through the Jemez Mountains northwest of Albuquerque. Its confluence with the Rio Grande is ~25 miles (~40km) river miles upstream from …