Schmidt et al: How we got here on the #ColoradoRiver Overview — John Fleck (InkStain) #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):

Jack Schmidt, Charles Yackulic, and Eric Kuhn have published an invaluable new overview of how we got into this mess on the Colorado River, and some of the things we need to think about to get out of it.

Schmidt, John C., Charles B. Yackulic, and Eric Kuhn. “The Colorado River water crisis: Its origin and the future.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water (2023): e1672. (I think that’s an open link, if for some reason it doesn’t work – I’m sitting on a university campus right now, so my Internet may be tunneling past a paywall – drop a note in the comments and I’ll find a way to help y’all get to it.)

They’ve pulled together the best available data on supply and water use in the basin, and touch on the major issues that must be addressed going forward.

Some highlights:

21ST CENTURY TRENDS

ON THE SUPPLY-USE IMBALANCE

and

If you are trying to understand the current situation on the Colorado River, there is no better place to start. It’s going into the fall syllabus for our UNM Water Resources course.