Mark Meyer

The right question in #ColoradoRiver litigation? Where does the Lower Basin’s half of the III(c) Mexico obligation come from? It’s roughly 750,000 AF. I asked Pat Mulroy, formerly @SNWA_H2O, this once. She was flummoxed and eventually stammered “All of us”. This was the right answer. Once the LB tributaries were used up and the Gila was removed from the equation by the 1929 BCPA the LB didn’t actually have any water to cover their obligation once @CAPArizona came online and they were using and over using their 7.5 MAF. Surplus in reservoirs covered it for a while so everyone ignored the issue but that’s gone now. LB needs an average of 9 MAF going through Lee ferry to cover the whole obligation so effectively the entire thing comes from the Upper Basin. Only with recent LB conservation are they in III(c) compliance. They can’t use more than 6.75 MAFY. All the years they weren’t they were draining the reservoirs unless there were surpluses from the Rockies. So the irony here is LB has been in long running III(c) non compliance, now they probably aren’t, but they may sue the Upper Basin because for the first time we are… because they drained the reservoirs with their III(c) noncompliance. You can’t make this stuff up. @azwater’s Guenther and Shiffer said exactly this in their 2007 law paper on the reasoning behind their litigation threats to get the 9 MAF in the Interim Guidelines. The ones they gamed in 2015-2019 which drained 3.75 MAF extra from Powell which is WHY THERE WASN’T ENOUGH WATER this year for a 7 MAF release putting us in III(c) non compliance by their twisted interpretation “When only 8.23 MAF is released annually from Lake Powell, the storage in Lake Mead is depleted and Lake Mead elevation drops significantly because releases of 8.23 MAF are insufficient to satisfy the 9 MAF mainstream water allocations of the Lower Division States and Mexico, plus the associated evaporation and other losses.” This gets to why @Interior has a “National Obligation” to remove the Mexico obligation from “all of us”. varuna.io/LOTR/2007/guenther…

USBR RISE Powell data is updated to early 10/26, its quite a bit lower than the USGS instantaneous I posted yesterday. Elevation 10/26 was 3528.66' Powell since 9/15 is up 683,010 AF Vs SEP26 24 month is up 772,673 AF I told you not to trust what I posted yesterday :< Apologies for the misinformation. USGS also revised the San Juan Bluff gage, it has a much higher peak of 41,500 CFS vs 37,300 yesterday. It is dropping now to 24,600. There are two reasons for discrepancy, RISE is somewhat earlier in the day and USGS has two parameters with different coordinate systems, NAVD_1988 and NGVD_1929. I have bathymetry for NAVD_1988 so was using that but it apparently reads substantially higher than USBR RISE. Elevation for NGVD_1929: 10/26 is 3527.9' 10/27 Now is 3529.0' Elevation for NAVD_1988: 10/26 is 3530.8 10/27 Now is 3531.9 I will have to do a bunch more research to use the instantaneous USGS gage. I definitely can't mix the two.