Water Matters!

The Great San Juan Flood

In this week’s Water Update*, Rin Tara and John Fleck give a rundown on the dramatic flooding on the San Juan River and across the Four Corners as the remnants of Tropical Storm/Hurrican Trudy were swept up in the storm track and dumped huge amounts of rain across the San Juan’s headwaters.

More news and links:

• John’s blog post tracking the flood as of Saturday, Nov. 24
• USGS gages
• San Juan near Bluff, Utah
• San Juan at Farmington
• The Navajo Times
• National Weather Service Albuquerque daily forecast discussion

*Since we recorded, Arizona's Central Arizona Project has also moved to intervene in Nevada's ongoing NEPA case over the Post-2026 Record of Decision. More information available here: https://knowyourwaternews.com/cap-sues-u-s-over-illegal-colorado-river-actions/

Guest: Tanya Trujillo

This month Rin Tara and John Fleck are joined by Tanya Trujillo, water policy advisor to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and the state’s deputy state engineer, to talk about the water challenges facing the state as climate change saps New Mexico’s water supplies.

A New Mexico native, Trujillo’s has a long water policy – general counsel for the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission; work in Washington, D.C., advising Sen. Jeff Bingaman and as an attorney in the Department of the Interior; the Colorado River Board of California; work with nonprofits working on western water; assistant secretary of the Department of the Interior for water and science in the Biden administration - before returning to New Mexico to her current post.

The list of challenges Trujillo discusses is long: the need for modernization of state government’s water management tools, things like meters and the capacity to enforce water use rules - “the bread and butter of water management” – to the long term needs of water planning and nurturing new ideas among the next generation of the state’s water managers.

Background:

• New Mexico 50-Year Water Action Plan

Preparing for what we hope will be a wet winter

While the aftereffects of Septembers flooding have left many New Mexico communities still digging out, the water supply impacts after a very dry year have been substantial. In this week’s Water Update, Rin Tara and John Fleck talk about a greening bosque along New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande and a boost to New Mexico’s Rio Grande Compact outlook after what had been a dismal year.

In other news:

• Free entry to New Mexico State Parks
• Building soil moisture at Slumgullion Pass in the Rio Grande headwaters (and lots of other Snotel sites)
• The history of the word “slumgullion”
• The federal government tries to sidestep New Mexico water law for border wall construction

The Rains Return

On this week’s episode, Rin Tara and John Fleck talk about Rin’s trip down Cataract Canyon on the Colorado River (totally work related!) while John stayed home and obsessed over weather radar and river gage readings as the Rio Grande, dry along large stretches through Central New Mexico for much of the summer, finally reconnected.

• To understand Cataract Canyon, check out the Returning Rapids Project
• Taos tightens water conservation measures
• Wednesday, Sept. 23, at the Guild Cinema: The Rio Grande: A Century of Water, Land and People in the Middle Valley
• Ribbons of Green – John talks about his new book, at the Guild Friday Sept. 25, 12:30 p.m.
• Money for Navajo Nation water projects

Guest: Eric Kuhn

“We need to understand the history.”
- Eric Kuhn

This week Rin Tara and John Fleck are joined on Water Matters by their longtime friend and collaborator Eric Kuhn, arguably the preeminent historian of the intersection between Colorado River hydrology and the evolution of the institutions developed to manage it.

Their subject is the arcane but now critically important issues of the Colorado River Basin’s “Upper Basin Initial Units,” a quartet of reservoir complexes on the Green, the Gunnison, the San Juan, and the main stem of the Colorado River. Approved by Congress in the 1950s and completed in the 1960s and ‘70s, the reservoirs have become a critical tool in managing 21st century shortages on the Colorado as water users and the federal government struggle to figure out how to share a shrinking river.

For background, some of the work Kuhn, Tara, and Fleck have published over the years on the underlying issues:

• Kuhn, Eric, Katherine H. Tara, and John Fleck. "Unfinished Business: Twenty-First Century Questions Posed by Ambiguities in the Upper Colorado River Basin Compact and the Law of the River." NML Rev. 55 (2025): 417
• Kuhn, Eric, Katherine H. Tara, and John Fleck. "A Horse Named “Stream Depletion Theory”: The History and Negotiation of the Upper Colorado River Basin Compact." Natural Resources Journal 65, no. 1 (2025): 69-122.
• Kuhn, Eric, and John Fleck. Science be dammed: How ignoring inconvenient science drained the Colorado River. University of Arizona Press, 2019.
• The work of “The Traveling Wilburys of the Colorado River,” a group of scholars and former water managers including Tara, Kuhn, and occasionally Fleck who write on the current Colorado River situation.

A River (Ever So Briefly) Returns

This week’s water update is a special edition as Rin Tara and John Fleck take you out to the Rio Grand in Central Albuquerque to experience the brief return of the Rio Grande to a river bed that has been dry for most of the summer.

Rin and John were there, tape recorder in hand, on Thursday (Sept. 3, 2026) at midday as a pulse of water provided by the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, and Audubon Southwest crept slowly beneath the I40 bridge near Old Town.

They could see the pulse shrinking as it moved downstream, which was the expected result – really the whole point of the exercise – as it soaked into the shallow aquifer that feeds the riverside bosque. Scientists are now monitoring vegetation response and changes in the groundwater levels beneath the bosque, to better understand how the system performs for future environmental management.

More information:

• John’s blog post with the final flow data from the US Geological Survey gages along the river
• An explanation from Paul Tashjian at Audubon Southwest about how the pulse came together
• Bryce Dix at KUNM explains the pulse flow

A Search for Silver Linings

The water numbers remain grim in this week’s Water Update, with 97 miles of drying in the New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande, which is not a record large number only because it rained enough to drop this week’s number beneath last week’s 100 miles of drying. But Rin Tara and John Fleck soldier on, searching for signs of hope in an otherwise grim water situation:

• Money for Albuquerque’s aquifer storage and recovery project
• Tortugas Dam rehabilitation project
• New Mexico Water Planning guidelines
• Project Jupiter groundwater pumping ruling
• Nevada sues federal government over Colorado River plan
• Tarantula migration

Guests: Kathryn Sorensen and Jack Schmidt

This week Rin Tara and John Fleck are joined by friends and colleagues Kathryn Sorensen and Jack Schmidt – members of the group that journalist Allen Best dubbed The Traveling Wilburys of the Colorado River – to talk about the future of management of the Colorado River.

Tara, Fleck, Sorensen, and Schmidt – along with fellow Wilburys Anne Castle and Eric Kuhn – have been collaborating for a number of years on analysis and recommendations for Colorado River management as reservoir levels drop toward record lows. In this episode, they lay out the details of the federal government’s newest analysis of future management options as the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico copes with the dramatic impact of aridification – drought made worse by climate change.

Further information:

• Department of Interior Final Environmental Impact Statement on future operations of the Colorado River
• Lake Powell and Lake Mead reach record lows
• The most recent Wilburys report: Colorado River Basin Storage Continues Slide Toward System Crash

A Dry Year Gets Drier

This week Rin Tara and John Fleck do their best to find hope, but in a year this dry it takes more work. Note that at the time of posting this episode, the Frijoles Fire has grown to 7,794 acres.

• Via John and Utah State’s Jack Schmidt, Lake Mead and Lake Powell continue their decline toward the lowest levels since the reservoirs were first built in the 1930s (Mead) and 1960s (Powell).
• The latest forecast for the coming Super El Niño: lots of winter precipitation for California and Arizona, meh for the Upper Colorado and Upper Rio Grande basins
• The greening of the bosque downstream of Albuquerque’s wastewater treatment plant, via the Aug. 8, 2026 overflight of the European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellite

It rained!

On this week’s water update, Rin Tara and John Fleck talk about the joy of a summer rainstorm, as Albuquerque was drenched by a monsoon storm Friday, July 24*, wetting the Rio Grande and providing a burst of flow in otherwise dry valley irrigation ditches.

*The storm we are talking about occurred on 7/24, but the Middle Rio Grande got another storm yesterday (7/28) that also dropped some moisture.

In other news:

• El Niño is strengthening
• Doña Ana County uranium drinking water contamination
• Harmful algal blooms
• New Mexico ISC draft water planning guidelines survey
• Stationarity is Dead (the classic Science paper on how, in water management, climate change changes everything)
• Ribbons of Green, (John’s book)

In this week’s Water Matters, John Fleck switches from the host’s chair to the guest’s chair (it’s really the same chair) as co-host Rin Tara sits down with him to talk about the new book he and Bob Berrens wrote, Ribbons of Green: The Rio Grande and the Making of Modern Albuquerque. From Voltaire’s Candide to the myth of a lost Garden of Eden on the Rio Grande Valley floor, Rin and John talk about how the effort to manage a river shaped the modern garden Albuquerque has become, and what lessons the process might have for the challenges our community faces in a climate changed world.

Lots of news on this week’s Water Matters.

• Kelsey Fendler rows the Pacific (paywalled)
• Mark Olalde, Alex Hager, and Sharon Chischilly on the Northeastern Arizona water settlement
• Algal blooms at Clayton Lake, but also dinosaur tracks!
• Santa Clara raises its water rates
• High tech fire detection in Albuquerque’s bosque
• Roswell water quality report
• Heather Sackett on Colorado West Slope lawmakers breaking from their state’s tough stance on Colorado River negotiations
• New Mexico gets a new Colorado River negotiator
• Inciweb for the latest fire updates

Hunting for signs of hope in a hot, dry June

With a high pressure system parked over the Four Corners, Albuquerque has been hot and dry, and in this week’s episode Rin Tara and John Fleck don’t shy away from the bad water news weighing on New Mexico:

• Total flow on the Rio Grande at Otowi so far this year is the lowest it has been since 1904
• 81 miles of the Rio Grande’s main channel between Otowi and San Marcial is dry
• The federal government has stopped paying to monitor the Rio Grande for Los Alamos National Laboratory contamination at Santa Fe’s Buckman diversion

But they also see hopeful signs:

• Forecasters say odds favor a wet summer monsoon season, the July-September period that brings afternoon thunderstorms to Albuquerque
• While the Rio Grande’s main channel is dry through large stretches of Albuquerque, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy district was able to capture some of the flow from recent rains to deliver water to irrigators in and around Albuquerque
• Delivering water to Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District outfalls to keep a bit of water flowing in the Rio Grande’s main channel

Other links and news of note:

• Restoring the headwaters
• Albuquerque’s drinking water quality report
• Surface water quality standards

Guest: Aidan Manning

This week Rin Tara and John Fleck are joined by Aidan Manning from New Mexico Wild’s Rivers and Waters Program to talk about El Niño and what it means for New Mexico’s weather and climate.

Dr. Manning explains how a shift in temperatures in the equatorial Pacific can have big impacts on the patterns of wet and dry weather, tipping the odds

Since Rin, John, and Aidan recorded this conversation, the forecasts have been updated. Odds of a moderate or stronger El Nino are up to a staggering 98% for the winter, with a 63% chance of a very strong event. But Dr. Manning points out the risk of misinterpreting what that means. El Niño tips the odds toward a wet winter across the southwest, but a stronger El Niño doesn’t necessarily translate to a wetter winter. And for the larger river basin communities New Mexico is a part of, El Niño generally doesn’t translate into odds of a wetter winter in the Upper Colorado River Basin, which is crucial for the West’s water supplies.

To follow the development of El Niño:

· NOAA’s El Niño/La Niña background

· NOAA’s official ENSO tracking

· Relative Oceanic Niño Index

· Mulitivariate ENSO Index

A Drying Rio Grande

This week Rin Tara and John Fleck provide an update on the increasingly dry conditions on New Mexico’s central river system, where flows on the Rio Grande at Albuquerque dropped to zero June 3 and are likely to stay that way until the valley receives monsoon rains. By one measure, flow into the Middle Rio Grande Valley is the lowest ever recorded, with streamflow records going back to 1895.

But if you want to see water, they provide hope in an odd place – Albuquerque’s wastewater treatment plant outfall, a reminder that “wastewater” is not actually being wasted when we return it to the river.

Also:

· Pollinator kits

· Texas v. New Mexico lawsuit settlement

· Pollinator Day at the Albuquerque Open Space Visitors Center

John’s book Ribbons of Green

Guest: Anne Marken

Anne Marken gets up every morning and looks at snowpack data and river flow numbers. As the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s River Operations and Telemetry Manager, it’s Marken’s job to marshal the Rio Grande’s precious water through New Mexico’s Middle Valley, juggling a dizzying array of competing needs, interests and values.

In this week’s Water Matters, Anne talks with Rin Tara and John Fleck about what that means in this most difficult of water years, with declining river flows, little upstream reservoir storage to make up for the snowpack’s shortcomings, and one of the warmest springs on record.

If you’re interested in the latest on river flows, you can do no better than Anne’s monthly report to the Conservancy District Board. In this episode of Water Matters, Anne talks about how she thinks about managing water in a difficult year like this.

If you’re interested in more information:

· Irrigators information meetings May 28 – June 24

· MRGCD’s real time river and irrigation system flow data

And, to quote Marken’s monthly request, with which she ends her report to her board, “Pray for rain.”

For the May 20 Water Update, Rin and John step away from discussing the bleak water numbers and take some time to talk about the moral obligation of hope, municipal water system resilience, flows for the Rio Grande silvery minnow, and some remarks from the recent NM Water Dialogue.

For further reading:

http://mariafarrell.com/

https://www.abcwua.org/wp-content/uploads/Your_Drinking_Water-PDFs/Water_2120_Volume_I.pdf

https://www.phoenix.gov/content/dam/phoenix/waterservicessite/documents/2021_drought_management_plan_final.pdf

In this week’s Water Matters, Rin Tara and John Fleck talk about the delightfully named “jiggle,” a series of pulses released from Isleta Diversion Dam downstream from Albuquerque. It’s a technique valuable in dry years to encourage the spawning of the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow. And this is a very dry year – the lowest flow ever recorded for late April, for example (when Rin and John recorded this), at the US Geological Survey’s historic Embudo Gage.

Links:

· A Silver Lining: Interpreting the Endangered Species Act to Envision Management of the Rio Grande Silvery Minnow in a Broader Cultural, Ecological, and Political Context, Rin’s paper on the silvery minnow in the UCLA Journal of Environmental Law and Policy

· Ribbons of Green, John’s new book with Bob Berrens about the history of Albuquerque’s relationship with the Rio Grande.

There is no way to sugar coat the bad water news pill as 2026 enters what should be the rising limb of the runoff season, as Rin Tara and John Fleck report in this week's water update.

Consider:

• Flow at Embudo, on the Rio Grande upstream from Española, is at its second lowest level for this point in the year in a record that, with a few gaps in the record in the early 20th century, goes back to the late 1800s.
• Flow at the the USGS Albuquerque gage is the lowest it has been at this point in the year in half a century.
• With the snowpack in the Rio Grande headwaters nearly melted out, the Rio Grande flowing out of the mountains at Del Norte in Colorado may already have peaked. It doesn't usually peak until June.
• Flow on the Gila in Southern New Mexico is the lowest it has been at this point in the year since record keeping began in 1928.

And yet... Rin went hiking over the weekend in the Gila and saw Painted Redstarts and a whole lot more, and John rode his bike down to Albuquerque bosque (a map to Albuquerque's delightful "Glass Garden here), where the cottonwoods are greening up. Both rivers - the Gila and the Rio Grande - were low but still lovely.

Guest: Tucker Davidson

It seemed unfair – asking Tucker Davidson to name his favorite bird. A senior water associate at Audubon Southwest, Davidson is a hopeless bird nerd – pulling out his binoculars as he drives Rio Grande levee roads and walks through Albuquerque’s bosque.

Davidson joins Rin Tara and John Fleck to talk about the birds he loves, the places he loves, and how you can turn to birds to bring hope as drought and climate change dry New Mexico’s rivers.

And you, too, can visit some of his favorite places in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley:

- The Rio Grande Nature Center

- Albuquerque’s Open Space Visitor’s Center (especially the pond out by the parking lot, which Tucker and his Audubon colleagues help supply with water)

- The ponds in the bosque near Tingley Beach

- For the dirt-road adventurous, the “River Mile 60” area near Fort Craig

- Any farm road around the valley, especially after irrigation. The birds love it.

Tucker’s birding bottom line: look for places where the water slows down.