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William Hargrove

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Water management in the middle portion of the Rio Grande Basin (between Elephant Butte Reservoir in New Mexico and Presidio, Texas) is challenging because water demand has continued to increase over time despite limited river water and dropping groundwater levels. While urban and agricultural users can cope with frequent droughts by using a combination of river water and pumping groundwater, little to no water reaches living river ecosystems in this region. Improving this situation requires a good understanding of river water and groundwater availability, now and in the future, as well as advantages and disadvantages of water management options to sustain these ecosystems. In particular, there is a need to determine...
Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Study region Middle Section of the Rio Grande Basin (MRG), U.S. Study focus Long-term tradeoffs of technologically possible land and water management interventions were analyzed to adapt irrigated agriculture to growing water scarcity in a desert environment under a projected warm-dry future. Nineteen different intervention scenarios were investigated to evaluate potential watershed-scale agricultural water savings and associated water budget impacts in the MRG. The interventions are based on (i) management innovations of growers in implementing deficit irrigation and changing cropping patterns using existing crops, (ii) changing cropping patterns by introducing new alternative drought-...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
We present a comprehensive analysis of water availability under plausible future climate conditions in a heavily irrigated agricultural watershed located in the middle section of the Rio Grande Basin in the United States Desert Southwest. Future managed streamflow scenarios (through year 2099) were selected from among 97 scenarios developed based on downscaled, bias-corrected global climate model outputs to evaluate future inflows to the principal surface water storage reservoirs, possible future reservoir releases, and groundwater pumping to sustain irrigated agriculture. The streamflow projections describe a wide range of dry and wet conditions compared to the average historical flows in the river, indicating...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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