The west is in the midst of bad drought, that may not pass

[AZ94Q]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05...tion=

Very interesting article..

"Continuing research into drought cycles over the last 800 years bears this out, strongly suggesting that the relatively wet weather across much of the West during the 20th century was a fluke. In other words, scientists who study tree rings and ocean temperatures say, the development of the modern urbanized West — one of the biggest growth spurts in the nation's history — may have been based on a colossal miscalculation."

For us AZ people..

"Some of the biggest water worries are focused here on Lake Powell, the vast blue diamond of deep water that government engineers created in one of the driest and most remote areas of the country beginning in the 1950's. From its inception, Lake Powell, the nation's second-largest artificial lake, after Lake Mead in Nevada, was a powerful symbol across the West. Some saw it as a statement of human will and know-how, others of arrogance.

Powell, part of the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, has lost nearly 60 percent of its water and is now about the size it was during the Watergate hearings in 1973, when it was still filling up. White cliffs 10 stories high, bleached by salts from the lake and stranded above the water, line its side canyons. Elsewhere, retreating waters have exposed mountains of sediment.

The tourist economy here in Page has been battered. The National Park Service, which operates the recreation area, has spent millions of dollars in recent years just to lay concrete for boat-launch ramps that must be extended every year, a process that one marina operator here called "chasing water."

Daniel C. McCool, a professor of political science at the University of Utah and director of the American West Center, says Powell is the barometer of the drought because what has happened here is as much about politics, economics and the interlocking system of rules and rights called the law of the river as it is about meteorology.

Part of the lake's problem, for example, dates to a miscalculation in 1922, when hydrologists overestimated the average flow of the Colorado River and locked the number into a multistate agreement called the Colorado River Compact. The compact, along with a subsequent treaty with Mexico, requires Lake Powell to release 8.23 million acre-feet of water each year below the river's dam, Glen Canyon, no matter how much comes in.

Because the river's real average flow was less than the 1922 compact envisioned, Powell very often released more than half of the water the Colorado River delivered. But it did not really matter because the upper basin states were not using their share. Now, communities from Denver to Salt Lake City and Indian tribes with old water rights in their portfolios are stepping forward to stake their claims. Lake Powell, which has been called the aquatic piggy bank of the upper West, is overdrawn.

If water levels continue to fall, Powell will be unable to generate electricity as early as 2007 or sooner, some hydrologists say. And it would be reduced more or less to the old riverbed channel of the Colorado River not long after that. Even now, the lake's managers say, it would take a decade of historically normal rainfall to refill it."

[redmanfx]

Remember Powell before they dammed it up. Was pretty small. My dad lives in Peoria and we've done alot of skiing and fishing there. All the old docks and park facilities are under water now.

If you want to see a guy on a wave runner kill themselves, go to Powell. I remember when the Army Core of Engineers were building that canal back in the 80's and some poor kid died every year during storm runoff. Man I'm getting old....

red

[VimyJ]

Global warming adherents maintain that rising temperatures will increase the size of the desert belts which run at corresponding latitudes in the southern and northern hemispheres .