Over the past year, the question of how to account for evaporation and system losses in the Lower Colorado River Basin has become a hot political and policy topic. With the recent Lower Basin water use reduction scheme, we seem to have set the question aside for now. But it’s not going away. My Science …
Lake Mead ended May 2023 at elevation 1,054.28 feet above sea level. That’s up five feet in a month, at a time of year when the reservoir is usually dropping, so I guess yay? It’s also up 6 1/2 feet from last year, so I guess yay? But also worth noting: Mead is down 32 …
Continue reading ‘Deadpool Diaries: June 1 Colorado River system status report’ »
I’ve had long conversations this week with smart friends grudgingly supporting of the Lower Basin deal to reduce Colorado River water use over the next few years. Their case for it is simple. Yes, it’s an awful deal in so many ways, but it does have the potential to generate some short term water use …
Continue reading ‘Deadpool Diaries: The Case for a Shitty Deal’ »
This feels like a shakedown. Nice river basin ya’ got there. Would be shame if somethin’ happened to it. For decades, Lower Colorado River water users have been taking more water than the river can provide, threatening their own communities’ futures. Unable to come up with a plan to live within their water means, they’re …
Continue reading ‘Deadpool Diaries: “Nice river basin ya’ got there….”’ »
My search for Albuquerque’s “Most Urban Irrigation Ditch” took us yesterday to the Stotts Lateral in the North Valley. The Stotts is about a half mile long, carrying water under the railroad tracks from the Alameda Lateral to the Alameda Drain. The east half is underground. The west half, tiny and concrete-lined, is an urban …
Continue reading ‘The Stotts Lateral: new candidate for “Albuquerque’s Most Urban Ditch”’ »
Lake Mead’s elevation in June 1978 was 1,183 feet above sea level. Good times.
A skeptical blog commenter suggested I was exaggerating the size of Cochiti Dam. I was not. Last year, on a bike ride to explore the area I am writing about for the new book, I rode NM16 up out of the Rio Grande Valley and around the dam’s southeastern flank to get a view of …
Continue reading ‘Yes, Cochiti Dam is really five miles long’ »
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”’ »
The Bureau of Reclamation is currently blasting water out the bottom of Glen Canyon Dam as Lake Powell rises with this year’s big snowmelt. (The big spike is an experimental flow pulse.) Lake Mead, as a result, is rising for the first time in a while, with the wrecked speedboats disappearing – and with it, …
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. …