From Circle of Blue (Brett Walton):
…extremely low moisture conditions now grip New Mexico, the new the epicenter of a cell of intense water scarcity that has shifted across the U.S for several years.
The plains states, Nebraska and Kansas, were hit worst last year. Texas was driest in 2011. The Southwest, in fact, has experienced middling precipitation for more than a decade, conditions that set the stage for New Mexico’s year of terrible dry. Some 90 percent of the state is in extreme or exceptional drought, the harshest categories in the U.S. Drought Monitor. Only a quarter of the state was in such condition a year ago.
Precipitation is also at record lows. The June 2012 to May 2013 period was the driest in the state’s 118-year record. Southern Colorado, whose mountains are the source of the Rio Grande River, New Mexico’s principal source of surface fresh water, has not fared much better. Worst of all is the corridor the river traverses in New Mexico. The central valley and the southern deserts have seen roughly a quarter of normal precipitation since October, according to the National Weather Service.
“We’re breaking the wrong kind of records,” Gary Esslinger, who manages the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, in Las Cruces in southern New Mexico, told Circle of Blue.
Esslinger cites his district’s main water supply, the nearly empty Elephant Butte Reservoir, as the most tangible evidence. When the gates at a secondary reservoir just downstream of Elephant Butte close today, the shortest ever irrigation season for the federal Rio Grande Project, which dates to 1915, will end, little more than a month after it started. The Rio Grande Project typically provides sufficient water to irrigate 78,000 hectares (193,000 acres) along the river in New Mexico and Texas.<