Brett Walton had a great bit of business in yesterday’s Circle of Blue story on 2019’s remarkable drop in Colorado River Lower Basin water use: The last time water consumption from the river was that low was in 1986, the year after an enormous canal in Arizona opened that allowed the state to lay claim …
Continue reading ‘March 1985: when everything on the Colorado River changed’ »
By Eric Kuhn As Utah pushes forward with its proposed Lake Powell Pipeline – an attempt move over 80,000 acre feet per year of its Upper Colorado River Basin allocation to communities in the Lower Basin – it is worth revisiting one of the critical legal milestones in the evolution of what we have come …
Continue reading ‘The roots of a coming Lake Powell Pipeline legal tangle’ »
My NIDIS webinar from earlier this week is posted. Key bits: This year’s “sneaky drought” is a problem. The longer term “megadrought” (climate change-driven aridification) we seem to be in is an even bigger problem. We’ve done some great work in the Colorado River Basin reducing our use of water and building the institutional widgets …
Continue reading ‘Coping with Megadrought in the Colorado River Basin’ »
By Eric Kuhn This winter’s decent snowfall has turned into an abysmal runoff on the Colorado River, thanks to the dry soils heading into the winter, along with a warm spring. It’s alarming, but given the large amount of storage capacity in the basin and the recent string of good runoff years in the upper …
I’ll be I’ll be yammering about the Colorado River basin, sneaky droughts, and megadroughts with the folks at NIDIS (the National Integrated Drought Information System): As the Colorado River Basin experiences 2020’s “sneaky drought” amid a long term pattern that looks increasingly like one of the region’s millennial “megadroughts” that last decades, water managers are …
Had occasion to revisit this written several years ago by the University of Arizona’s Kathy Jacobs, it seems very much on point as we pursue the next set of Colorado River negotiations: There has been an unending chorus of people who are convinced that the “Law of the River”—the numerous contracts, laws, court decisions, and …
In the Time of Pandemic, the bottom half of one of my favorite paintings by the artist R.J. Fleck (my late father) has become a feature of my Zoom lectures, and webinars, and now an appearance with John Blackstone on CBS This Morning Saturday. It’s the Grand Canyon, and I said some stuff about the …
Dennis Patch (Colorado River Indian Tribes) and Ted Kowalski (Walton Family Foundation) in the Arizona Republic: Tribal nations have historically been left out of planning and negotiations that develop river management across the Colorado River Basin. Meaningful tribal inclusion going forward will not be an easy task. It requires leadership from all involved to authentically understand …
Continue reading ‘on the importance of tribal participation in Colorado River governance’ »
Eric Kuhn’s been calling this a “sneaky drought”: Another forecast predicting a dry warm spring for the Colorado River basin – The official CRBFC May runoff forecasts will be out next week. Look for a big drop in the A-J unregulated inflow to Lake Powell. https://t.co/5GkozLVHim — Richard Eric Kuhn (@R_EricKuhn) May 1, 2020 …
Continue reading ‘“sneaky drought” in the Colorado River Basin’ »
Between trying to figure out how to work with graduate students I can’t see in person, and starting nervously at our pantry counting cans of beans, it’s been hard to do any of the work that has sustained me these last many years. Thinking, and writing. As the fog settled in back in March, one …
Continue reading ‘Kuhn and Fleck talk about “Science Be Dammed”. May 6, in the cloud.’ »