Colorado Water
Ed Quillen discusses Colorado Water issues in his column in today's Denver Post [August 3, 2004, "Sobering thoughts on water"]. From the column, "But some years are drier than others, and our 2000-03 drought ranks only 16th in dry spells since 1437. The 1953-55 drought was 12th, and the worst droughts were in the 1840s and 1580s. We know this from tree-ring research conducted by the Paleoclimatology Branch of the National Climatic Data Center and the University of Colorado in Boulder. In wet years, trees grow more, so the rings are more widely spaced. Some evergreens - Douglas fir, ponderosa and piñon - can live for centuries (one fir on the South Platte drainage dates back to 894, or 1,110 years ago)...The records available during the negotiation of the compact showed an average annual flow of about 18 million acre-feet in the Colorado River. Thus there appeared to be ample water for the provisions of the compact, which are simplified here: 7.5 million for the Upper Basin (Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah), 7.5 million for the Lower Basin (Arizona, Nevada, California) plus an extra million if available, and 1.5 million for Mexico (half from each basin). A 1948 agreement gave Colorado 51.75 percent of the Upper Basin share - in theory, 3.88 million acre-feet. But the long-term data show that the Colorado River can reliably produce, on average, somewhere between 13.3 million and 15 million acre-feet a year. Take the lower number, subtract the 8.25 million owed to the Lower Basin and Mexico, and there's 5 million for the Upper Basin; Colorado's share is about 2.6 million. And we may already be using 2.8 million acre-feet a year from the Colorado River (there aren't many solid numbers for this). This means that no matter what you hear from politicians who say Colorado needs to develop its unused share of Colorado River water, we might well have already developed our share, and perhaps a little more."
7:44:16 AM 
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