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Scientists Say They Can Predict Colorado River’s Annual Water Supply. What Does That Mean for Agriculture, Wildfires?

/in , , /by /Deseret News (Utah)

Scientists can now predict drought and overall water supply on the Colorado River years in advance, according to a new study published by researchers at Utah State University.

The team of scientists believe long-term “ocean memory,” in conjunction with atmospheric effects and the influence of land systems, correlates with cycles of drought in parts of the western U.S., which then leads to water shortages on the Colorado River.

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Tensions from Water-Sharing Deal with U.S. Boil Over In Mexico

/in , /by /Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazetteby Natalie Kitroeff

The farmers armed themselves with sticks, rocks and homemade shields, ambushed hundreds of soldiers guarding a dam and seized control of one of the border region’s most important bodies of water.

The Mexican government was sending water — their water — to Texas, leaving them next to nothing for their thirsty crops, the farmers said. So they took over the dam and have refused to allow any of the water to flow to the United States for more than a month.

“This is a war,” said Victor Velderrain, a grower who helped lead the takeover, “to survive, to continue working, to feed my family.”

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Opinion: Using Lake Powell to Keep Lawns Green in Utah Would be a Waste of Resources

/in , , /by /Las Vegas Sun

The recent downgrade in the forecast for the flow of water in the Colorado River should be a death punch to the proposal to build a new pipeline out of Lake Powell. The pipeline was already a major threat to Las Vegas and much of the rest of the Southwest; now the threat risk is heading off the charts.

The proposal would drain 28 billion gallons of water per year from Lake Powell to St. George, Utah, and the surrounding area. That’s a huge amount of water — more than a quarter of what Nevada is allotted annually from Lake Mead (97.8 billion gallons).

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Six Western States Blast Utah Plan to Tap Colorado River Water

/in , , /by /ABC Newsby Sam Metz (Associated Press/Report for America)

Six states in the U.S. West that rely on the Colorado River to sustain cities and farms rebuked a plan to build an underground pipeline that would transport billions of gallons of water through the desert to southwest Utah.

In a joint letter Tuesday, water officials from Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Wyoming urged the U.S. government to halt the approval process for the project, which would bring water 140 miles (225 km) from Lake Powell in northern Arizona to the growing area surrounding St. George, Utah.

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Glen Canyon Dam Tapped for Emergency Water Releases to Meet California Power Demands

/in , , /by /AZ Centralby Erin Stone

For the first time in nearly two decades, the federal government tapped Glen Canyon Dam for extra power generating capacity this weekend, triggering emergency water releases as heat waves persisted across the West.

As temperatures hit records in California, power providers turned to sources in Nevada, Utah and Arizona to cope with the surge in demand across its electrical grid.

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