I put up a slide for my University of New Mexico water resources graduate students during class yesterday afternoon with two pictures – the emerging canyons at the upper end of Lake Powell, and a smallmouth bass. When Lake Powell gets low, we get a) the remarkable emergence of Cataract Canyon, and b) warm water …
Continue reading ‘Tools for better environmental adaptation as we manage the Colorado River’ »
Public opinion has always favored the free use of water. Brackett, Dexter. “Consumption and Waste of Water.” Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers 34, no. 2 (1895): 185-203. In 1848, the designers of Boston’s water works assumed a need of 28 gallons per capita per day (GPCD). By 1872, while searching for and …
Continue reading ‘Consumption and Waste of Water, circa 1895’ »
Eric Kuhn, Rin Tara, John Fleck The pending Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Agreement settles Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, and San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe claims to the Upper Colorado River Basin in Arizona. To do so, Arizona’s 50,000 AF entitlement of Upper Colorado River Basin water will be allocated. Although Arizona’s testimony during …
This version of the Colorado River graph, courtesy of Jack Schmidt, more clearly illustrates the narrative of the talk I’m giving later this week: Early 20th century pluvial, when we built the institutions Mid-century baseline, when we built all the dams and farms and cities Millennium drought, when we emptied the reservoirs
Putting together a slide deck for a talk next week, borrowing Brad Udall’s trick of a horizontal line for visualizing the mean during different time periods.
By Jack Schmidt Unfortunately, water use between now and next April is on track to exceed the inflows of the snowmelt season, resulting in a net loss of reservoir storage. The persistent decrease in runoff is severely challenging the quest to rebuild reservoir storage. Summary Reservoir storage in the Colorado River basin is now …
Continue reading ‘Reservoir Drawdown in 2024: Are We on Track to Recover Storage?’ »
A federal judge this week criticized the federal government for failing to consider the risk of a Colorado River Compact call in its environmental review of the planning for Denver Water’s expansion of Gross Reservoir in Boulder County. Wrangling over the risk of a compact call – which the judge said could force water use …
Continue reading ‘Federal Judge Cites Upper Colorado River Basin’s Compact Call Risk’ »
The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District Board this afternoon (Monday Oct. 14, 2024) approved an agreement among the District, the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, and the Bureau of Reclamation for temporary storage of District water in Abiquiu Reservoir on the Rio Chama while El Vado Reservoir is out of comission. This is a …
Continue reading ‘MRGCD Board Approves Abiquiu Storage Deal’ »
Update: Data here is from USDA, the “USGS” in the graphs is a typo in the code I used to generate them, which I’m too lazy to fix. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2024 estimate of alfalfa acreage in New Mexico, 130,000 acres, is the lowest it’s been since the 1950s. Acreage is down 55 …
The Arizona Department of Water Resources has published a thoughtful and also delightfully testy response to Enduring Solutions on the Colorado River, the white paper Kathryn Sorensen et al. (I’m one of the et alias) published in August. First a reminder of our core premise: As we work to reduce water use on the post-2026 …