Peter Gleick in the Sacramento Bee: As California swelters and burns through the fourth year of the worst drought in 1,200 years, nonpartisan and bipartisan efforts have been increasingly effective. A multibillion-dollar bond measure passed by voters last year is providing funds for drought relief and new supply and conservation programs. Water utilities are expanding …

Continue reading ‘From Peter Gleick, an optimistic take on California drought response’ »

The Bougainvillea is justly classed among the most showy of our climbers and when planted beside a veranda or when allowed to climb on a tall tree or building gives gorgeous effects. – Gardening in California: Landscape and Flower, by John McLaren, 1914

The water outside the window of my Yuma, Ariz., hotel, has been rising since Monday. The Bureau of Reclamation likes to keep it below 3,000 cubic feet per second here so it doesn’t disturb the lovely park the folks of Yuma built here over the last decade. But sometimes its hard. There’s an irony to …

Continue reading ‘Plumbing the pulse flow’ »

We’re apparently now supposed to call it “street art”.

Amid the outpouring on the occasion of Lou Reed’s death, a particularly fine epitaph from the folks at the Westboro Baptist Church (pdf): From his early days as a frontman for the punk band The Velvet Underground and his inclusion as part of Andy Warhol’s infamous Factory, Lou Reed has been teaching sin and rebellion …

Continue reading ‘teaching sin and rebellion to generations of brutish American youth’ »

At a water board meeting this afternoon, the attorney mentioned “Junior Wells”. My mind wandered: Turns out that wasn’t what he meant: During litigation involving one of the largest water plans developed in recent years, it was discovered that about 60,000 acre feet per year were being taken by junior wells from the South Platte …

Continue reading ‘Oh, he meant those junior wells’ »

New analysis of the tricky problem of quantifying California’s groundwater depletion uses data from NASA’s GRACE satellite to come up with some startling numbers: Here we use 78 months (October, 2003–March, 2010) of data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite mission to estimate water storage changes in California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin River …

Continue reading ‘Pumping California’s Central Valley Dry’ »

During family day at the construction site of the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s new Lake Mead water intake structure, they let folks sign the tunnel boring machine. My favorite: