Water Matters!

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 lawmaker...

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...

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...

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...

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 wi...

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/Wate...

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 re...

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...

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...

Water Update: a shrinking Colorado River forecast A declining runoff forecast for the Colorado River Basin means a tough year for water users as the Bureau of Reclamation juggles competing needs. Expect low releases in 2026 from Glen Canyon Dam, which means lower levels at Lake Mead this year, and efforts to move water downstream from Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Utah-Wyoming Border to prop up r...

Guest: Phil King With a final agreement in sight that would settle Texas's 13-year-old lawsuit against New Mexico over water use on the Rio Grande, Rin Tara and John Fleck and joined by Phil King, retired New Mexico State University professor and one of the experts who has been helping sort out the complex details of the agreement. In the lawsuit, Texas charged that New Mexico's groundwa...

With irrigation water flowing through the irrigation ditches of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley, Rin Tara and John Fleck look at the latest snowpack numbers, river flows, and the remarkable temperatures Albuquerque has seen over the fall and winter of 2025-26. Links: USGS Albuquerque gage (Why do they spell it “gage” instead of “gauge” ?)  Snowpack reports Statewide Comprehensive Outdoor Rec...

The latest round of storms helped the snowpack in New Mexico’s headwaters rivers a little, but we’re so far behind that we still should expect to see a dry Rio Grande through central New Mexico this summer. In this week’s Water Update, the Utton Center’s Rin Tara and John Fleck take a look at the snowpack, the runoff forecasts, and the latest reservoir storage numbers. Spoiler alert: they’re not g...

Guest: Stacy Timmons, Associate Director for Hydrology Programs at the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources  When the New Mexico legislature approved the Water Data Act in 2019, the state turned to Stacy Timmons to turn an idea into useful data tools to help communities around New Mexico manage a future with less water. Operating out of a third-floor office of the New Mexico Bureau o...

The snowpack and runoff forecasts for New Mexico’s rivers have begun conjuring up stories about the epically dry 2002. On this week’s episode, Rin Tara and John Fleck talk about the forecast, and the comparison. On the Rio Grande, the Natural Resources Conservation Service is forecasting just 35 percent of median runoff at Otowi , in north-central New Mexico, with very little water at all making i...

With Albuquerque’s first big snow storm of 2026 in the rearview mirror, Rin Tara and John Fleck look at how the mountains holding the critical snowpack for New Mexico’s Rivers fared. They also share the latest on the US Bureau of Reclamation’s challenges in keeping Lake Powell’s water levels high enough to protect Glen Canyon Dam’s outlet works, and the implications that will have for Colorado Riv...

Guest: Dr. Ladona Clayton As the New Mexico legislature begins a budget-focused 30-day session, the New Mexico Water Ambassadors have laid out their top legislative goals, critical steps needed to move the state toward a more sustainable water future. Dr. Ladona Clayton, Executive Director of the Ogallala Land and Water Conservancy, joins Rin Tara and John Fleck on this edition of Water Matters! t...

The snowpack in the headwaters basins of northern New Mexico and Colorado points to another low-runoff year on New Mexico’s major rivers. The January federal forecast projects flows of less than half the most recent 30-year average on the Rio Grande at Otowi, the key measurement point for central New Mexico, and just 17 percent at San Marcial, just above Elephant Butte Reservoir. With three months...

When Irving Berlin penned “White Christmas” more than six decades ago, he did not have Albuquerque in mind. According to the National Weather Service, the chances of actually seeing falling flakes here on Christmas are about one in thirty. But that does not stop Rin Tara and John Fleck from hoping, scanning the long range weather forecasts as they write those last holiday cards and record their la...

Guest: Stephanie Russo Baca The old Western cliché that whiskey’s for drinking while water is for fighting over has always been problematic. Frequently attributed to Mark Twain, it seems that Twain never said it. And research by the Utton Center’s Stephanie Russo Baca shows that sharing water – ensuring that no one goes dry when the water runs low – is a viable approach to New Mexico water managem...

This week, Rin and John talk about flows on the Rio Grande, planning for a new federal river management project south of Socorro, groundwater contamination questions, and the future of federal clean water regulation. Rio Grande With the irrigation season over and the Rio Grande’s riparian vegetation shutting down for the winter, river flows are up through Albuquerque. But the biggest reason for th...

Guest: John Fleck A decade ago, the Utton Center's Writer in Residence John Fleck published his book Water is For Fighting Over and Other Myths About Water in the West , an exploration of water governance in the Colorado River Basin. Amid an often pessimistic literature, led by iconic titles that Fleck read as a young journalist - Mark Reisner's Cadillac Desert and Philip Fradkin's...

Rin Tara and John Fleck discuss water conditions in New Mexico for the week of November 10.

Rin Tara and John Fleck discuss water conditions in New Mexico for the week of October 27. A full interview episode will be available later this month.

Guest: Don Bustos, Santa Cruz Farms Irrigated from the Acequia del Llano running across the upper end of his four acres outside Española, New Mexico, Don Bustos' Santa Cruz Farms feels as if it has been there as long as the land itself. A rambling walk through the farm follows ditches carrying the water past patches of asparagus and the last of the blackberries, down one side past some new he...