Unsettled Waters: A blog on water rights in the American West

For those of you who track water adjudications, one of the more interesting ones has been in Idaho . That state has nearly completed the Snake River adjudications much to everyone else's surprise. These are handled a bit differently, obviously, from the New Mexican cases I'm more familiar with, but still - there are lessons to be learned from this approach, I think. What could NM do to speed things up? Certainly the use of geotechnologies has picked up the pace of doing the technical work - but adjudication is not just a mapping problem, it's a legal challenge, and a political morass. More on this matter later, for now, here's the full story link.

Grim news from the long-term NOAA forecast for New Mexico and much of the Southwest: it doesn't look good, folks. Another year of water sharing and shortages. We'll be, perhaps, luckier in Colorado only because our Fourteeners (mountains higher than 14000 ft) intercept more Pacific moisture that gives us our snowpack. But it's not likely that 2014 will snap the long-term drought plaguing New Mexico. More later, but for more on the details, see John Fleck's excellent write-up and some of the NOAA probability maps here:  http://www.abqjournal.com/337588/abqnewsseeker/nm-drought-outlook-bad-to-worse.html September 2014: Hindsight update: ENSO kicked in at the right moments this summer of 2014 and has reverted most of the extreme drought situation in New Mexico. The recent hurricane Odile rains have also helped significantly as well, even if too much water soaked into southern New Mexico. Another humbling reminder that forecasts can be useful, but completely wrong. Res...