By Jack Schmidt, Utah State University Center for Colorado River Studies How did we do in the continuing effort to recover reservoir storage? How much reservoir storage accumulated from this year’s snowpack, and how does that accumulation compare to other years? In Summary: Total basin-wide reservoir storage is an appropriate metric to describe the status …
Continue reading ‘The 2024 Runoff Season Comes to an End – How Did We Do?’ »
Preparing for A Thing I’m doing next week, I updated the Crazy Fleck Spreadsheet this morning of data from Reclamation’s annual Lower Basin decree accounting reports. Amid all the angst and rhetoric, it is easy to miss the salient fact made clear by this graph: Lower Basin water users have reduced their take on the …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River 2023 Water Use: An Optimistic Narrative’ »
Our friends at the Abiquiu News (yay local journalism!) have an update on the sediment plug on the Rio Chama that’s been playing havoc with Rio Grande flows: The Rio Chama is officially on its way back into its original channel as of Tuesday evening. Workers from the US Department of the Interior Bureau of …
Congress set aside substantial sums of money in 2021 and ’22 in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act to address needs for access to safe, clean drinking water. But, as John Echohawk puts it: While the appropriation of funding for infrastructure is a critical first step, it is only that – continuing …
Continue reading ‘Tribal access to water – filling a key gap’ »
Talking to Jake Bittle for his Grist piece on the trials and tribulations of El Vado Dam, he asked me a question I loved: “What does this mean in the larger scheme of things?” My answer: We’ve optimized entire human and natural communities around the way this aging infrastructure allows us to manipulate the flow …
Continue reading ‘In New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande, the wheels are coming off’ »
A team out of Wyoming, including my Colorado River Research Group colleague Kristiana Hansen, has a new paper that reminds us that we need to be careful about how we thinking about conserving water that is being “wasted.” Their case study is an area on the New Fork in Wyoming, a tributary of the Green, …
Continue reading ‘A reminder to be careful how you think about “wasted” water’ »
In my book Water is for Fighting Over, I delighted in this cheap shot at the Bureau of Reclamation’s Boulder City office – … a grandiose white building atop a hill … surrounded by an expanse of lawn that is embarrassing in a desert city that averages less than six inches of rain a year. …
Continue reading ‘Important update on the Bureau of Reclamation’s Boulder City lawn’ »
Janet Wilson had a super helpful piece this week in the Desert Sun about steps being taken (in a hurry) to get the institutional widgets in place to meet Lower Basin commitments to reduce water use under a deal hashed out in spring 2023 to head of Colorado River NEPA litigation. If all goes as …
Continue reading ‘Hustling to get Imperial Irrigation District water reduction tools in place’ »
Central New Mexico’s Rio Grande water users are perched on the edge of a dangerous precipice because of our failure to deliver enough water to Elephant Butte Reservoir, according to a June 28, 2024, letter from the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer to the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District. We’re currently 121,500 feet …
The graph uses day-long averages. The actual peak yesterday was over 3,000 cfs at the Central Avenue Bridge. Here’s what it looked like around noon: