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.

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 reservoir levels at Lake Powell, behind Glen Canyon Dam.

On the Rio Grande, flows remain low, the snowpack is almost completely melted, irrigators can expect another dry year with reduced supplies for locally grown crops, and we should expect the Rio Grande to dry again this year through Albuquerque.

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 groundwater pumping was depriving Texas communities of water to which it was entitled under the 1938 Rio Grande Compact, an agreement dividing the Rio Grande's water among Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas.

King explains how the proposed settlement would create a new way of measuring the flow of the Rio Grande from New Mexico to Texas, and require the retirement of agricultural land in Southern New Mexico as part of an effort to bring water use in line with available supply.

The proposed settlement has won preliminary approval from the "special master" who has been advising the Supreme Court of the United States on the case, with final action on the agreement possible later this year

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 Recreation Plan (SCORP!)
• Utton’s Rio Grande Basin Documentary
• The European Space Agency’s Copernicus Browser, for the latest satellite data
• Albuquerque temperature data from xmACIS

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 good.

But despite the bad news, both Tara and Fleck managed to get out to the river and find joy in what we’ve got.

Correction: Aldo Leopold was the Secretary of the ABQ Chamber of Commerce from 1917-1919, not a member of City Council.

Show notes links:

· Colorado River Post-2026 management Environmental Impact Statement process

· Snowpack maps

· Streamflow at Albuquerque

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 of Geology building on the New Mexico Tech campus in Socorro, Timmons oversees the bureau’s efforts to figure out what sort of data communities need, and to help them get it - or get access to the myriad different kinds of data already being collected, turning it into useful tools.

The program’s latest project is using aerial surveys to measure water beneath the ground in places where there are not enough measurement wells to give communities the data they need to manage their aquifers. On this edition of Water Matters, Rin Tara and John Fleck talk with Timmons about groundwater measurement, aerial surveys, the importance of good data to support good decisions, and the joys of running along ditchbanks think about the water around us.

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 it down past San Marcial downstream from Socorro.

One big difference between 2002 and this year: in 2002, New Mexicans had a lot of water banked in upstream storage to keep the Rio Grande flowing during the dry summer months. “Only thing that allowed us to manage thru the year was releases of water stored in previous years. If this dryness continues, with no storage to speak of, 2026 will be a very difficult year of water management/flows and, unfortunately, possibly fires,” Rolf Schmidt-Petersen, retired New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission chief, wrote in the comments on John’s blog.

John posted a graph on his blog showing the comparison between 2002 storage and today.

Also on the latest episode:

• Rin talks with us about their conversation with Alex Hager at KJZZ in Pheonix about the possibility of a short-term agreement on Colorado River management as a federal deadline looms.]
• A pitch to join Utton and the broader New Mexico water community for a screening of Rio Grande Basin in New Mexico, a film by the Utton Center. March 2, 2026, 5-6:30 p.m. Room 2401, UNM School of Law, 1117 Stanford NE, Albuquerque.