The Santa Fe Review

Returning to Santa Fe on New Year’s Eve, I was curious to see if there had been any snow over the Christmas holiday. The night before our departure for St. Thomas, a few inches had fallen, enough to make for a slow, nerve-racking drive to the Albuquerque airport. But it was clear as we pulled back into the driveway that the week had been mostly dry. Amy Lewis, who operates the weather station at Seton Village, tells me that there was a grand total of 0.82 inches of snowmelt for the entire month of December — 2 1/2 times less than in December 2008. For the year she measured 13.74 inches of precipitation. (Please see the Ultimate Santa Fe Precipitation Chart.) At the Santa Fe airport the total for 2009 was only 10 inches, making it the driest year since 2004. So far in January there has been no new moisture at all.

Dry weather at least makes for good flying, and early last week Tom Blog took me up in his Cessna for a look at the town from about 1,000 feet. We headed up Cerrillos Road, passing over the wasteland that was the old Santa Fe Indian School. From there we headed northeast over Thornburg headquarters (I wanted to take in all my favorite sights) and circled over the villages of Chupadero and Rio en Medio. Flying back south over the foothills, we got a stunning view of the Santa Fe River all the way from the Canyon Road treatment plant past Nichols and McClure Reservoirs, stacked one above the other on the mountain. I had never seen both of them at once. Frozen and white with snow they shone among the pines — the source of 40 percent of Santa Fe’s drinking water.

Nichols and McClure Reservoirs

After pausing for a look at the Tom Ford mansion and what turned out to be my best photo of the day (warning: this is a 5.6 megabyte download), we headed west toward the Rio Grande, where the rest of the city’s water comes from. Construction was continuing at the new treatment plant on Caja del Rio Road, which will clean the water pumped up from the Buckman diversion dam.

Buckman Treatment Plant

We flew along the pipeline past Diablo Canyon and the Buckman well field to the Rio Grande, then followed the river north to where it meets the Chama. All of this territory, my favorite part of the world, seemed so compact and finite from the air. Before I knew it we were almost to Abiquiu Lake. We cut south past the black volcanic mesa called Cerro Pedrenal and ascended a few thousand feet higher for a flight over the Valles Caldera and Redondo Peak, then down the other side of the Jemez Mountains to Cochiti Dam. Back when I was finishing high school in Albuquerque, a corporation called Great Western Cities announced that by 1980 it would build a town next to Cochiti as big as Santa Fe. Thankfully it turned out to be a scam. I’d forgotten the story until just recently when Emlen Hall, the retired UNM law professor I mentioned in a previous post, sent me an article he wrote almost 30 years ago in The New Mexico Review.

The Santa Fe River, or at least the dry river bed, enters the Rio Grande just north of Cochiti, and as we headed back home I watched it until it disappeared inside the deep basalt canyon at La Bajada. Someday I’d like to hike that stretch, from there north to La Cienega. (How esoteric all this geography must sound to readers who don’t know northern New Mexico. Live here long enough and it’s like being indoctrinated into a cult with its own private language.)

Before we landed I spotted the river one last time, fat with discharge from the sewage treatment plant on Airport Road. We’d come full circle, seeing where water comes into the city and where it goes back out again.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

December 8, 2009

As I was shoveling a path to my office early last week,  the snow (about 4 1/2 inches) seemed particularly dense. Typing WeatherData["KSAF", "TotalPrecipitation", {{2009, 12, 1}, {2009, 12, 31}, "Day"}] onto a Mathematica page showed that, melted down, Santa Fe received 0.19 inches of precipitation. But that was down at the airport. Amy C. Lewis, a hydrologist who maintains the weather station in Seton Village, just south of town, says she measured 0.42 inches of water from the storm. She has also sent me data filling in the blanks of the Seton chart I compiled earlier this month and has provided measurements from the Santa Fe 2 station dating all the way back to November 1867! She gathered the numbers the old-fashioned way, by poring over the hard copy reports in the State Library. I didn’t even know those records existed.

Another reader, William Henry Mee, has sent me a spreadsheet of his own measurements on County Road 44-A in the San Marcos area. I have included all this new information in what I now will call the Ultimate Santa Fe Precipitation Chart. (You can also download it as a spreadsheet.)

This morning I used the new data to compute 10-year averages dating back a century:

Santa Fe precipitation by decade

On the chart, “1890s”  means 1889 to 1898, “1900s” means 1899 to 1908, and so forth. That way the righthand bar represents the most recent full decade of precipitation. You can see how over the last 40 years Santa Fe became accustomed to wetter weather. The  population of the county grew like moss, from 38,153 in 1950 to 143,937 by 2008:

Santa Fe County population by decade

But unlike moss it kept on growing, even as the weather dried up.

George Johnson

The Santa Fe Review

A couple of months ago, as an early Christmas present to myself, I bought a copy of Mathematica, the powerful software package invented by Steven Wolfram, a physicist/entrepreneur I’ve written about in the Times and interviewed on bloggingheads.tv. Once I’d downloaded the program, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, so I started playing around. I typed an arbitrary trigonometric formula — Tan[x]/Tan [y], {x, -5, 5}, {y, -5, 5} — into a Mathematica notebook page and asked for a three-dimensional plot. It looked like a good place to go hiking:

In Mathematica (but not here) the image becomes a virtual object that you can grab by the corner and twirl around, exploring every nook and cranny. Plot3D[Sec[4 x]/y^3, {x, 1, 6}, {y, 1, 6}]] gives you this:

I wondered if I could find some combination of tangents, sines, and secants that would reproduce the contours of Talaya, Atalaya, and the other mountains I see from my eastern window. But I was already in over my head.

Not only can you see a function. You can hear it. In Wolframese, Plot[Sin[700 t + 100 t Sin[350 t]], {t, 0, 4}] means this:

Replace “Plot” with “Play” and the image becomes a sound (Warning: Turn down the volume on your headset before pressing the button below.):

More germane to the purposes of The Santa Fe Review are Mathematica’s meteorological functions. Type in WeatherData["KSAF", "TotalPrecipitation", {{1970, 1, 1}, {2009, 12, 31}, "Month"}] and Mathematica pulls in National Weather Service records of monthly precipitation at the Santa Fe Airport. I’d been looking for something like that for years. The Western Regional Climate Center has a page of historical measurements beginning in 1972. But midway through 2006 the updates inexplicably stopped. By importing the Mathematica data into a spreadsheet, I hoped to make a fuller range of information available.

Water molecule

I immediately ran into a problem, not with Mathematica but with the numbers it was getting from the weather service. According to its data, Santa Fe received 40 inches of rainfall in 1988 — and 45 inches in 1991 and 52.57 inches in 1994! This in a city where a good year might bring 12. (Maybe a corrupt database explains the suspiciously high normal rainfall figures in the New Mexican’s daily weather chart.) On the other hand, we’re informed, it didn’t rain a drop in Santa Fe from October 1981 until September 1984, a three-year drought that somehow hasn’t made it into the history books.

In search of better information, I reluctantly turned to the confusing labyrinth of a website run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Many clicks later I finally found historical records from 1932 through 2009. But there was a catch. This is government information paid for by taxes. By all rights it should be in the public domain. But NOAA wanted $100 for access. Through some weird fluke, I found that if I started with 1933 instead of 1932 the price fell to $40. So I put the item in my shopping cart and paid with a credit card.

Here’s what I got for the money, an unruly data dump that began like this:

	COOPID,WBNID,STATION NAME ,CD,ELEM,UN,YEAR,A,S,MO,DA,  JAN
	,F,F,MO,DA,  FEB ,F,F,MO,DA, MAR ,F,F,MO,DA,  APR ,F,F,MO,DA,
	 MAY ,F,F,MO,DA,  JUN ,F,F,MO,DA,  JUL ,F,F,MO,DA,  AUG
	,F,F,MO,DA,  SEP ,F,F,MO,DA, OCT ,F,F,MO,DA,  NOV ,F,F,MO,DA,
	 DEC ,F,F,MO,DA,ANNUAL,F,F
	------,-----,------------------------------,--,----,--,----,-
	,-,-
	-,--,------,-,-,--,--,------,-,-,--,--,------,-,-,--,--,-----
	-,-,
	-,--,--,------,-,-,--,--,------,-,-,--,--,------,-,-,--,--,--
	----
	,-,-,--,--,------,-,-,--,--,------,-,-,--,--,------,-,-,--,--
	,--- ---,-,-,--,--,------,-,- 298072,99999,SANTA FE
	,10,TPCP,HI,1933,9,9,01,00, 00073, , ,02,00, 00021, , ,03,00,
	00029, , ,04,00, 00080, , ,05,00, 00099, , ,06,00, 00230, ,
	,07,00, 00200, , ,08,00, 00190, , ,09,00, 00124, , ,10,00,
	00116, , ,11,00, 00102, , ,12,00, 00047, , ,13,99,-99999,M,

I wrestled with the gibberish until finally, 12 hours later, it succumbed. Here it is, the most complete record of Santa Fe rainfall and snowfall you’re likely to find: Santa Fe, New Mexico Monthly Precipitation, 1933 to 2009. You can also download my spreadsheet and the raw data. No one should have to buy this information again.

The measurements come from five different stations: Santa Fe (298072), Santa Fe 2 (298085), Santa Fe 7 SE (298087), Santa Fe Seton (298088), and Santa Fe 2 SE (298090). For unexplained reasons, the Santa Fe Airport (23049) isn’t included in the set. Maybe that is just as well since it was the source of the bad Mathematica data.

From the table I learned that the driest year has been 1956 with 6.68 inches. The wettest was 1965 with 20.71. The average from 1933 through 2008 was 13.56 inches. But during this decade it fell to 12.13. Through November 2009 we’ve had 9.68 inches. (That’s at the airport. My historical chart for the other locations runs only through July.) The snow last night was refreshing. But any way you parse the data, it will take a blizzard to make this even an average year.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

On Highway 53 between Ramah and Grants, N.M.

In 1988 the United States Supreme Court dealt New Mexico a devastating blow. It ruled that since the 1960s the state had been cheating Texas out of 10,000 acre-feet a year of Pecos River water. New Mexico was ordered to pay $14 million in restitution and to make sure that this never happened again. Emlen Hall, a professor emeritus of law at the University of New Mexico, wrote about the saga in High and Dry: The Texas-New Mexico Struggle for the Pecos River, the most interesting book I know about water in the Southwest.

The river begins as a creek funneling snowmelt off the south slope of the Santa Barbara Divide in the Pecos Wilderness northeast of Santa Fe. On its way down the mountains, the Pecos is joined by the Rio de los Chimayosos, which drains the Truchas Peaks, then by Beatty Creek, Jack’s Creek, Panchuela Creek, Winsor Creek, and Holy Ghost Creek. Roaring with water, the stream continues south through Santa Rosa, Fort Sumner, Roswell, and Carlsbad before crossing the Texas state line. Ensuring that there is anything left by then to satisfy Texas has been a legal, political, hydrological, and engineering nightmare.

As recently as 2001, in the depths of the drought, Tom Turney, who was New Mexico’s water czar (the proper title is State Engineer), warned that he might have to make a priority call: upstream users with junior water rights, including the city of Roswell, would have their supply cut off. That was enough to grab the attention of the state legislature: $34 million was appropriated to buy up 18,000 acres of Pecos farmland and take it permanently out of production. To get through the year without incurring penalties, $900,000 was spent to purchase water from the Carlsbad Irrigation District, and thousands of acre-feet of ground water was pumped by the state and dumped into the river.

Given all that effort and expense, it was strange to learn last week from Julie Ann Grimm in the New Mexican that a proposal is still on the table to pump 6,850 acre-feet a year of Pecos water all the way back to Santa Fe, a distance of 450 miles. The entrepreneurs behind the scheme, Berrendo LLC, have been pulling out all the stops. All that new water, they say, would mean more affordable housing and a more reliable, diverse water supply. It would also mean more subdivisions and sprawl. According to the company’s presentation on the Santa Fe City website, Berrendo has the support of Fort Sumner’s mayor and city council and the De Baca County Commission.

When a similar plan was hatched a few years ago to pipe in water from the Estancia Valley, local residents came here to rally in opposition. In Fort Sumner, we’re told, they are eager to get out of the farming and ranching business. Why bother with cattle and alfalfa when you can sell your water at a premium to the city slickers in Santa Fe?

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

In 2002, with Santa Fe suffering from the driest weather in decades, two newly elected City Councilors, Rebecca Wurzburger and David Pfeffer, introduced an ordinance that became Santa Fe’s first water budget. Each year the city would determine how much water was available from its wells and reservoirs — the Total System Supply — and how much water was needed for present and anticipated uses. This Total System Demand would be subtracted from Total System Supply. Only if there was an excess would new construction be allowed.

If that is all there had been to the ordinance, development would have been stopped in its tracks. There is never any extra water. There was, however, an important loophole. Anyone wanting to build a new house or even a new subdivision could bureaucratically “create” new water by paying to replace water-guzzling appliances in existing homes or businesses with more efficient models. To build a new house, no matter how large, one would have to retrofit between eight and twelve old toilets, depending on the size of the lot. That would supposedly make up for the entire amount of water the new house would consume.

The construction industry was so pleased with this fiction (the alternative was a building moratorium) that Mayor Larry Delgado, whose tie-breaking vote led to passage of the bill, was honored by the National Builders Association at an annual convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Please see item 3 on the very first page of the Santa Fe Review). A black market for toilet retrofit credits quickly sprung up, and Santa Fe continued to get bigger and more crowded. 2003 was even drier than 2002, but the city kept on issuing building permits, pretending that because of the retrofit requirement there was no impact whatsoever on the water supply.

Near Diablo Canyon

On its face, the new water budget, passed last month by the City Council, is a big improvement. A detailed estimate must be made of how much water a proposed project will use. The builder must then obtain enough “conservation credits” to offset the impact. (As has been true in recent years, larger developments must purchase Rio Grande water rights and transfer them to the city.)

With a diminishing number of old toilets to replace, credits can now be created in other ways — by replacing shower heads, washing machines, and other fixtures; by installing rain catchment systems and xeriscaping. Property owners who earn credits this way can transfer them to the city (in return for a conservation rebate), and the city can hold them in its water bank for public projects or for resale to builders and developers.

More ambitious property owners have another option: entering into a water conservation contract with the city. They would agree to reduce their water use by a certain amount in return for credits that could be sold to a developer or kept for future uses — building a guest house or adding a bathroom. More generous souls could donate their credits to things like affordable housing, greener parks, or a flowing Santa Fe River.

The river, in fact, gets all kinds of lip service in the new ordinance. According to the minutes of the August 12 Council meeting, Councilor Calvert introduced a last-minute amendment urging the city to make “every reasonable effort to maintain a minimum flow in the Santa Fe River and to sustain a healthy riparian ecosystem.” Another amendment by Councilor Wurzburger includes “creation of a living Santa Fe River” among the city’s many priorities. These are nice thoughts, expressed so vaguely as to allow for maximum wiggle room. What is a “reasonable effort” and how does the city decide among its various priorities? A request by the Santa Fe Watershed Association for the city to specifically require that half the water saved by conservation go to the river was rejected out of hand.

For all its aspirations to be different, Santa Fe is still guided by a rather ordinary assumption: that the primary use for water is to accommodate more development. This summer’s effort to maintain a small amount of water in the river has been an encouraging gesture. But how long will that last? So far 2009 has been about as dry as 2002. If next year is as bad, there will be nothing but good intentions to prevent the city from shutting down the river, while keeping the building permits flowing.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review