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 …
The ditches were flowing across Albuquerque’s valley floor yesterday as I criss-crossed them on a long, aimless bike ride, the first day it really felt like spring. The cycling challenge at this winter<->spring pivot point is clothing – layers for a morning start hovering just above freezing, with a pannier stuffed with the layers by …
Continue reading ‘Deadpool Diaries: In March, the Rio Grande/Colorado River snowpack went bonkers’ »
Sunday’s bike ride book research took us up along the old Duranes ditch, through Albuquerque’s near north valley. The landscape is still wearing its winter coat, but it’s clearly dusting off its leaf-growing apparatus and getting ready for spring. We stopped to get a look at one of my favorite old farm fields, on Los …
Continue reading ‘“partición de bienes” – Albuquerque’s Long Lots’ »
The first water is heading down the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s Albuquerque Main toward town. “I love this time of year,” an MRGCD guy told me years ago. “You can feel the valley breathing in.”
Today’s ENSO outlook (El Niño Southern Oscillation) suggests a consensus among “the models” that the odds are tipping toward an El Niño for the coming summer and fall. The humans in the loop are more bearish: The most recent IRI plume favors ENSO-neutral to continue through the spring, with El Niño forming during summer 2023 …
I was talking to a friend last week about the work Bob Berrens and I are doing for our new book on the origin stories of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District. I’m deep into a chapter on the failed 1920s efforts at tobacco farming (I’ve told that story before here), and we were talking …
Continue reading ‘The peculiar economics of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’ »
As we try to adapt to climate change, understanding how our changing hydrology funnels through legal filters will be crucial. That’s why the South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center funded this terrific piece of work by UNM Water Resources Program student Annalise Porter: New Mexico’s Greenbelt Law: Disincentivizing Water Conservation Through Agricultural Tax Breaks, just …
Continue reading ‘Tax Breaks and Water Conservation Disincentives in New Mexico’ »
The big farms we have left in Albuquerque’s South Valley are weird. I spent a good fraction of my weekend staring at maps of them, or riding my bike around them, or both. My co-author Bob Berrens and I have zeroed on in this area for a key part of the storytelling in our new …
Doing reading for the new book on early 1920s Albuquerque, as business leaders pursued what would become the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, I see the regular return of a phrase I’d come to see frequently my reading of Colorado River history in the same time period: the flood menace Here’s the Albuquerque Journal, reporting …
Continue reading ‘the rise and fall of “the flood menace”’ »