The snow is turquoise
Posted on | February 3, 2011 | No Comments
Click on the image to be taken to a NASA Earth Observatory item on the snow cover from "the Blizzard of Oz." The shot above has been colorized turquoise for better visibility.
Tags: chance of rain > Emily Green > midwest blizzard > NASA Earth Observatory
High good, low bad: Mead in January 2011
Posted on | February 1, 2011 | No Comments
The Economist is the latest migratory Eastern (English this time) high flier to take a pass over Lake Mead and notice the “bathtub ring,” then to quote Las Vegas water manager Pat Mulroy, who said that Southern Nevada is the “canary in the mine shaft” of western water scarcity. That would be true if canaries were the ones running the mines. Anyway, as far as January on the Colorado River went, a far more interesting story appeared last month in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which reported that work on the “starter tunnel” for the “third straw” for Las Vegas to draw water from an ever-shallower Lake Mead will need to begin afresh because of persistent flooding problems. Click here to read Henry Brean’s report.
Meanwhile, for those who follow such things, Lake Mead closed at 1,091.73 feet, or thereabouts. By way of characterization, suffice it to say that the elevation is the lowest it’s been at the close of January since the 1960s and the construction of Glen Canyon Dam upstream. The closing January elevation of Lake Mead last year was 1,100.02, a decade ago 1,197.27. You get the drift, and the source of the bathtub metaphors for the mineral deposits left on the sides of America’s largest reservoir as its stores steadily shrink. Click here for a full set of Lake Mead’s elevations since the construction of the Hoover Dam from the federal Bureau of Reclamation.
UPDATE February 2, 2011: The Deseret News reports: In recent weeks, the level of Lake Powell has been dropping sharply. The agency that controls the reservoir is releasing 11 billion gallons of water each day to help bring up the level of Nevada’s Lake Mead.
“That level of release hasn’t occurred since the late ’90s,” said Richard Clayton, a hydraulic engineer for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation whose job is to oversee releases from the Glen Canyon Dam. Click here to keep reading about the balancing act between Powell and Mead.
The Dry Garden: Lili Singer
Posted on | January 28, 2011 | No Comments
On March 5, what has amounted to a year-long birthday party will conclude with a gala at Descanso Gardens. Everyone with $75 and a love of native plants is welcome to attend a shindig marking the 50th year of the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers & Native Plants.
Celebrating the stoic glory of our native flora is a great cause, but this isn’t just about the birthday of an organization affectionately called Teddy Payne by KPCC radio host John Rabe. It’s not even about the English seedsman for whom the foundation is named. It’s about the foundation’s special projects coordinator, the homegrown horticulturist Lili Singer, who turns 61 on Saturday and whose nearly four decades of garden teaching in Southern California has much to do with the rise of not only the Theodore Payne Foundation, but also the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden, the Southern California Horticultural Society, the city of Santa Monica’s sustainable landscape program and many independent nurseries and private gardens.
Click here to keep reading about Lili Singer in the Dry Garden column of the Los Angeles Times.
Pass the buffalo
Posted on | January 27, 2011 | No Comments
The president intimated Tuesday that the Department of Interior may be in for some cuts, however Interior Secretary Ken Salazar followed up yesterday with a shadow state of the union address for staff. Click here for the text. Included in the oratory is a pledge to “increase available water supply for agricultural, municipal, industrial, and environmental uses in the western United States by 490,000 acre feet through Reclamation’s conservation-related programs.” Also on the promise list is increasing capacity for renewable energy on public lands, while at the same time ensuring complete environmental review. How the latter can be assured without the environmental reviews being a sham is unclear. Via the Great Basin Water Network.
Tags: chance of rain > Emily Green > US Bureau of Reclamation > Water
State of salmon
Posted on | January 25, 2011 | 2 Comments
The best quip of the President’s State of the Union address: “… the Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they’re in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they’re in saltwater. And I hear it gets even more complicated once they’re smoked.”
Nice joke, good speech, but the laugh is a short-lived one for Californians, raising as the gag does the suggestion that in streamlining the way we manage salmon it would somehow be possible to tilt power from the agency that protects the fish when they migrate (Commerce) toward the agency that drains rivers of the fresh water that they need to breed (Interior).
Or vice versa.
This taxpayer for one is happy that Commerce is there to demand that the Endangered Species Act be invoked when salmon are imperiled by freshwater diversions to farms and cities. At the same time, this Californian is dependent on fresh water supplied by Interior. As such, the curious thing about the laugh line is that it aimed at bureaucratic waste instead of waste of natural resources. Isn’t the real issue water conservation?
As he summed up our challenges, in this the President was surely right. “We will argue about everything.” Click here to read the text of the speech.
UPDATE 1/26/2011: Evidently I was not the only one to find the salmon joke less than hilarious. This press release is just in from Earthjustice. Read it for an elegant clarification of who does what concerning the iconic fish of the Pacific.
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