This remarkable image by Roberto Rosales, my former Albuquerque Journal colleague now taking pictures for City Desk ABQ, captures a sharp reality of Albuquerque. We built our city in a flood plain, and in particular downtown beginning in the 1880s in a low area that was part Rio Grande flood path, and part swamp. That …
Continue reading ‘“sad havoc” – what happens when you build a city in a flood plain’ »
Two key takeaways from Monday’s (May 13, 2024) Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District board meeting: El Vado Dam, crucial for managing irrigation, municipal, and environmental water through New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande valley, will be out of service indefinitely – for many, many years. The vague structure of alternative storage options, using other existing dams, …
We’ll get an update on the status of El Vado Dam and related issues at this afternoon’s (Mon. 5/13/24) meeting of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s board of directors. This is an enormously consequential issue for Rio Grande flows through central New Mexico. The Meeting Today’s board meeting starts at 3 p.m. at the …
The Rio Grande is up through Albuquerque right now, swollen with spring snowmelt. But not for long. We may already have hit the runoff peak at a bit above 3,000 cubic feet per second in late April, and a friend who’s been cheerfully nagging me to float it with them talked me into locking down …
Continue reading ‘Floating Albuquerque’s Rio Grande: notes on “naturalness”’ »
A recent rapid warmup has brought high flows to the Rio Grande through New Mexico. But with a modest snowpack sitting in the mountains to the north, that means we should expect the early rise to be followed by an early drop. Members of the Inkstain Rio Grande Rapid Response Team (IRGRRT) were busy over …
Continue reading ‘Rapid snowmelt on New Mexico’s Rio Grande’ »
The Bureau of Reclamation’s announcement at Monday’s meeting of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District that it is halting work on El Vado Dam repairs raises hugely consequential questions about water management in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley. The short explanation for the halt is that the current approach to repairing the 1930s-era dam …
It is telling that I got excited when I noticed inflow into New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley approaching “normal”, which I now define as the median of 21st century flow. Our climate-altered world, y’all. A note on the evolution of the graph: I’ve added the “max” and “min” lines back. I dropped them because …
Inspired by Jack Schmidt’s monthly “how much water is in Colorado River storage” posts (see here for last month’s), I’ve been playing with a similar tool to help me think about the status of our reservoirs on the Rio Grande system here in New Mexico. The graph above helps me with two important intuitions about …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico’s Rio Grande reservoirs: Running on Empty’ »
Daniel Rothberg wrote this week about an important case in Nevada that is testing the boundaries of the question of tribal sovereignty: The Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe filed a formal motion earlier this month to intervene in a federal regulatory proceeding that could eventually pave the way for a pumped storage hydropower project on the …
Continue reading ‘Tribal sovereignty and pumped storage hydropower in Nevada’ »
I feel this morning a bit like a kid watching the NORAD map of Santa on his global travels, as I hit “reload” on the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s new gaging data page. The district opened the diversion gates early this morning at Cochiti Dam, at the head of what we call New Mexico’s …
Continue reading ‘Watching the water spread across the Middle Rio Grande Valley Floor’ »