Touring Hoover Dam Friday afternoon, a friend deeply embedded in the “Law of the River” asked if I knew that Section One of the 1928 Boulder Canyon Project Act was carved in stone on one of the Dam’s iconic towers: Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of …
As has become my December tradition, I’m in a Las Vegas hotel room preparing for this year’s meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association/finishing up grading my University of New Mexico Water Resources students’ final papers for the just-finished semester. This year’s class – our introductory course for graduate students in our Masters of …
Preparing for a panel I’ll be moderating at next week’s Colorado River Water Users Association meeting on the next steps in negotiating river management rules, I went back to a similar panel held last summer at the University of Colorado’s Getches-Wilkinson Center. (the session starts at around 3:23:00 here) John Entsminger of the Southern Nevada …
Continue reading ‘Litigation to settle our Colorado River disagreements is a terrible idea’ »
California’s use of Colorado River water this year is on track to be the lowest since at least 1949. (the latest forecast numbers are here) My data on the early years is sketchy, but thanks to the folks at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, who recently shared an excellent dataset they assembled some …
We’re closing out 2019 with big flows on the Rio Grande through Albuquerque – at least big for this time of year. Flow at the Albuquerque gauge Friday topped 2,000 cubic feet per second, setting a record for Nov. 29 at a gauge that goes back to the mid-1960s. A couple hundred of those cubic …
Continue reading ‘On New Mexico’s Rio Grande, the biggest year since 1995’ »
Eric and I will be doing a Webinar Jan. 22, sponsored by the American Water Resources Association: In their new book Science Be Dammed, Eric Kuhn and John Fleck explain how even when clear evidence was available that the Colorado River could not sustain ambitious dreaming and planning, river planners and political operatives irresponsibly made …
Continue reading ‘Kuhn-Fleck webinar Jan. 22 to talk “Science be Dammed”’ »
Water policy folks in other western states may yawn at this, but in New Mexico it’s a big deal. The New Mexico Office of the State Engineer has approved the state’s first instream flow water right. Here’s a summary from Audubon, the group that put the deal together, explaining how it works. The deal would …
Continue reading ‘Historic New Mexico Instream Flow Right Approved’ »
I look forward every year to the annual gathering of the New Mexico Water Dialogue. It’s always a great meeting – the speakers etc. But even more so, it’s a great gathering of our version of “the network” – the diverse collection of folks across cultures and geographies in our state who understand the importance …
Continue reading ‘Building resilience in New Mexico water – Water Dialogue meeting, Jan. 9’ »
If past trends in greater Phoenix – agricultural land transitioning to urban – the area is on track to groundwater “safe yield”, according to new research by an Arizona State University team: Under (business as usual) conditions where population is expected to increase and agricultural activities to gradually decrease, our results indicate a reduction in …
The Imperial Irrigation District board will take up a resolution this afternoon drawing a sharp line. If action isn’t taken to deal with the Salton Sea, the historic early-2000s deal that attempted to untangle California’s Colorado River overallocation (the “Quantification Settlement Agreement” or QSA) “will have been breached”: The full text of the resolution and …
Continue reading ‘Imperial Irrigation District’s line in the Salton Sea sand’ »