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.