Five years from now, if all goes to plan, Arizona will have conserved 5 million acre-feet of water.
That’s enough to fill about 2.5 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Or about 70% of what the state is estimated to use in a year, from all sources.
Or a little less than double Arizona’s annual Colorado River allotment (that is, if we were getting our full allocation, which hasn’t happened in a while).
The drought-stricken Colorado River is in critical condition. Almost two years ago, the federal government declared the first ever shortage on the river, triggering cuts to water supplies in the Southwest. Today, the river remains unsustainably low. The Colorado is the lifeblood of the region. It waters some of the country’s fastest growing cities, nourishes some of our most fertile fields, and powers $1.4 trillion dollars in annual economic activity. The river runs more than 1,400 miles, from headwaters in the Rockies to its delta in northern Mexico where it ends in a trickle.
Floods and their consequences are a reality for many worldwide, including those living in California. This reality is evidenced by pictures of people stranded on roofs surrounded by water, people paddling down water-filled streets in makeshift boats, and farm fields and orchards covered in standing water. However, there is also growing acceptance that floods are natural, recurring events that have positive aspects, especially where they support migratory waterfowl, enhance fisheries, and sustain wetlands and their high diversity of organisms (Mount et al 2023).
Nearly 200 million people in the United States, or 60% of the U.S. population, are under a heat advisory or flood warning or watch and have been since Thursday, according to the National Weather Service.
It’s a summertime sequence that’s become all too familiar in California: Extreme heat forces air conditioners into overdrive, which pushes the state’s power grid to the brink.
In August 2020, a major heat event fueled by the climate crisis forced some of the state’s first rotating power outages in decades, as the ongoing transition to green energy lagged behind demand. Last September, Californians narrowly avoided blackouts as a record-breaking heat wave broiled almost every corner of the state for days.
The Colorado River this spring ran high, fast and so full of sediment pushed downstream from wildfire burn scars that the water treatment plant in Hot Sulphur Springs couldn’t keep up.
The sediment repeatedly clogged the town’s intake valves, forcing town leaders to issue and emergency order in April and call for residents to voluntarily cut back on water use.
A battle remains underway in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Delta.
For decades, Delta residents and the state have been unable to agree on a plan to transport water from the rainy but rural northern part of the state down to the heavily populated, dry southern half.
In mountain peaks across the West, it’s their job to make it snow.
No, they’re not wizards, even if the work they do seems like magic.
For nearly a month, millions of people across the American Southwest have sizzled, sweated and sweltered under a heat wave that refuses to let up.
Day after day, residents from Fresno to Phoenix have endured triple-digit temperatures and hot, restless nights that have offered little relief.
July has been so hot thus far that scientists calculate that this month will be the hottest globally on record and likely the warmest human civilization has seen, even though there are several days left to sweat through.
The World Meteorological Organization and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service on Thursday proclaimed July’s heat is beyond record-smashing.
