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Lots of rain in Mancos so far.Jackson lake is full and great fishing.Glad we live at the headwaters and not downstream.Lucky us I guess.
Meanwhile, the 2411 acre Jackson Lake in Morgan County is dropping 2" a day and water levels are so low the boat ramp has been closed because of the agricultural need to draw down of the lake.
The non-profit ProPublica has been putting out some outstanding investigative stories about the decline and fall (of water levels in its two major reservoirs) of the Colorado River. I have been following this series - titled Killing the Colorado: The water crisis in the West - with great interest and an ever growing sense of concern. Here's an excerpt from ProPublica's most recent reporting (emphasis my own):
Quote:
For years, experts in the American West have predicted that, unless the steady overuse of water was brought under control, the Colorado River would no longer be able to support all of the 40 million people who depend on it. Over the past two decades, Western states took incremental steps to save water, signed agreements to share what was left and then, like Las Vegas, did what they could to protect themselves. But they believed the tipping point was still a long way off.
Like the record-breaking heat waves and the ceaseless mega-fires, the decline of the Colorado River has been faster than expected. This year, even though rainfall and snowpack high up in the Rocky Mountains were at near-normal levels, the parched soils and plants stricken by intense heat absorbed much of the water, and inflows to Lake Powell were around one-fourth of their usual amount. The Colorado’s flow has already declined by nearly 20%, on average, from its flow throughout the 1900s, and if the current rate of warming continues, the loss could well be 50% by the end of this century.
Earlier this month, federal officials declared an emergency water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time. The shortage declaration forces reductions in water deliveries to specific states, beginning with the abrupt cutoff of nearly one-fifth of Arizona’s supply from the river, and modest cuts for Nevada and Mexico, with more negotiations and cuts to follow. But it also sounded an alarm: one of the country’s most important sources of fresh water is in peril, another victim of the accelerating climate crisis.
Americans are about to face all sorts of difficult choices about how and where to live as the climate continues to heat up. States will be forced to choose which coastlines to abandon as sea levels rise, which wildfire-prone suburbs to retreat from and which small towns cannot afford new infrastructure to protect against floods or heat. What to do in the parts of the country that are losing their essential supply of water may turn out to be the first among those choices.
Here in Cortez, it feels like we are living at ground zero of an impending and terrible calamity. The use of irrigation water from the Colorado River basin is integral to the town's economy out here on the high desert. Farmers and ranchers here, including the Ute Mountain Ute tribe grow mostly hay and alfalfa to sell as animal feed - especially for cattle. Both hay and alfalfa are thirsty crops and to put it plainly, its a waste of precious water resources to be growing feed that will be shipped to far away places - even as far as Saudi Arabia - to be used for cattle feed.
Agriculture uses about 70% of the Colorado River's flow and developers in places like Denver and Phoenix have had their eyes on that water for quite some time now. Down in Arizona the farmers are already being paid to let their land go fallow and this practice will only increase as the drought continues and the water in Lake Powell and Lake Meade begin to circle the toilet.
As much as farmers may love their land and their way of life, they are also forced to be pragmatic. Here in what is called the Great Sage Valley, most of the land will probably go fallow within the next 5 years. This will make for a barren landscape that will recede away into desert. Most of the native plants and almost all the native trees will die. In fact, this is already happening. When even the cottonwoods and the piñon pines start to die off, it does something to your very soul and much as you may not want to recognize it, you know that a change for the bad is coming. Rural Colorado will be facing some very desperate times in just the next few years.
As someone who’s birth year is in my username, I don’t have conscious memory of ever not being in a long-term drought. I’m convinced my native region (born in Lubbock, TX, with a couple of family lines being among the first to settle the Panhandle) will be depopulated within my lifetime as the cotton, wheat, and dairy farmers squander what’s left the Ogallala aquifer and pray god takes care of it. I’m fairly sure America’s first major internal refugee crisis will be caused by Lake Mead dropping below operational levels.
Concerning this summer, as soon as I read La Niña was setting up, I figured the massive fires that hit the beetle kill up in this part of Colorado will hit southern Colorado this summer/fall. I’ve been telling people that Denver’s weather this summer will more closely resemble Albuquerque’s historic climate norms.
What seems to be happening is that, as the atmosphere warms up, it has the ability to store more water vapor. It takes more atmospheric instability to cause precipitation events, but when it happens, it’s torrential. The overall precipitation across the southern half of the US appears to be decreasing slightly, but because of the less even distribution of precipitation, evapotranspiration is increasing, which makes landscapes even more arid. We’re all familiar with the term “flash flood”, but get ready for “flash drought” to enter our vocabulary. Even the wet subtropical climate in the South has started experiencing these.
The Colorado watershed issue is something that will only be addressed through tense inter-state conflict and depopulation. Although Front Range municipalities own water rights west of the divide, they’re largely backup reservoirs, and most of the municipal water supply is still sourced east of divide. How the Front Range fares over the coming decades is still a coin toss. I figure the best case scenario is that precipitation will vary year-to-year from almost rainless summers to torrential monsoons, and that our dams will be heightened to have the ability to storage capacity for up to a year or two’s worth of water from the sporadic torrential monsoons.
As for how to adapt, water storage is obviously the key, as is xeriscaping. Our drainage infrastructure needs to be able to handle a season’s worth of precipitation falling in a day without letting all the water run off downstream. I keep my (small) front yard sodded for the neighbor kids to maintain and play on, but my backyard is xeriscaped. I try to water my food garden boxes with mainly rain barrel water through drip irrigation. One idea that runs through my head is that all the Victorian landscaped single-family yards could easily grow a significant portion of our food, and hopefully there will be businesses that can take advantage of that.
It’s not doom and gloom. It’s just physics at this point.
I agree with much of what you've said. Here in WA we experienced a "heat dome" where temps exceeded 107* in the sun, followed by a 100 year flood, a 500 year flood, and another 100 year flood, in the period of 1 calendar year. They are STILL repairing and doing mold abatement in the homes that were flooded, as the flooding and Covid shortages/Covid in-migration has hit the trades hard with far more demand than available labor.
Here it is, early September, and we are getting the most sheeting rainstorm yet this year. Complete with thunder, lightning, wind.
Moving on from fire risk to severe erosion or flooding...
KJCT is Grand Junction's ABC affiliate and they were saying that a lot of activity is going on in the Four Corners area. At least someone is getting rain. Fruita, Loma, and Mack sure isn't. 100 degrees for the last four and the next four days will be the same. The humidity is 8%-not good. I'm just thankful that the wind isn't howling. Last time I checked is that Fruita is at 3.2 inches of precip this year. Ugh.
KJCT is Grand Junction's ABC affiliate and they were saying that a lot of activity is going on in the Four Corners area. At least someone is getting rain. Fruita, Loma, and Mack sure isn't. 100 degrees for the last four and the next four days will be the same. The humidity is 8%-not good. I'm just thankful that the wind isn't howling. Last time I checked is that Fruita is at 3.2 inches of precip this year. Ugh.
Wow! I hadn't realized that it was so bad up in your neck of the woods! This year's monsoon really came through for the Four Corners region, but it looks like its going to start to taper off. The forecast for Cortez is 0% chance of precip and highs ranging up to the mid nineties for the next week or so. The farmers around here have been getting in their final cutting of hay for the year, and I've got to say that the harvest looks less than overwhelming despite the monsoon rain. Fingers crossed for a good snow pack up in the mountains this winter!
Last evening I happened to chance across a vinegaroon. They look like a cross between a spider and a scorpion and live in our Southwestern deserts. I haven't seen any in I don't know how long, but they will come out if there's been some rain to entice them from their hiding places. Here's a picture of one that resembles the one I found lurking near my front porch.
Yes, they are sometimes called that. The vinegaroon - or camel spider - in the picture is just a close approximation to the one I actually saw. Didn't have my cell phone with me, otherwise I would have snapped its mugshot.
KJCT is Grand Junction's ABC affiliate and they were saying that a lot of activity is going on in the Four Corners area. At least someone is getting rain. Fruita, Loma, and Mack sure isn't. 100 degrees for the last four and the next four days will be the same. The humidity is 8%-not good. I'm just thankful that the wind isn't howling. Last time I checked is that Fruita is at 3.2 inches of precip this year. Ugh.
3.2” precip year to date is desert level. I hate to think how dusty it must be there. Even the day after heavy rains here, the ground sucked it down so fast and the intense sun burned on it so fiercely that roads are again dust strips.
Another article in the NY Times on water woes in the west. In "Climate Change Is Ravaging the Colorado River. There’s a Model to Avert the Worst" the times points out that "Success in the Yakima River Basin in Washington holds lessons for the seven states at war over water in the American West." As is often the case, this article contains superb photographs of the Yakima River area of WA.
Excerpts:
"The water managers of the Yakima River basin in arid Central Washington know what it’s like to fight over water, just like their counterparts along the Colorado River are fighting now. They know what it’s like to be desperate, while drought, climate change, population growth and agriculture shrink water supplies to crisis levels. They understand the acrimony among the seven Colorado Basin states, unable to agree on a plan for deep cuts in water use that the federal government has demanded to stave off disaster. But a decade ago, the water managers of the Yakima Basin tried something different. Tired of spending more time in courtrooms than at conference tables, and faced with studies showing the situation would only get worse, they hashed out a plan to manage the Yakima River and its tributaries for the next 30 years to ensure a stable supply of water.... The circumstances aren’t completely parallel, but some experts on Western water point to the Yakima plan as a model for the kind of cooperative effort that needs to happen on the Colorado right now. ... “It’s going to require collaboration on an unprecedented level,” ... after several years of give-and-take, the result was the Yakima Basin Integrated Plan, a blueprint for ensuring a reliable and resilient water supply for farmers, municipalities, natural habitats and fish, even in the face of continued warming and potentially more droughts."
The question for the Colorado River stakeholders is are they able to collaborate or will they drag this out in courtrooms for decades until everyone is dead.
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