Chama water shortfall likely

Climate change is likely to render a key part of the water supply for Santa Fe and Albuquerque increasingly unreliable in coming decades, according to a new analysis by federal scientists. The San Juan-Chama project, which imports water from the mountains of Colorado for use in New Mexico’s most populous cities, is likely to see shortfalls in one of every six years by the 2020s, and four out of every 10 years by the end of the century, according to researchers at Sandia National Laboratories and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The study comes as federal officials are warning that for the first time in the project’s 40-year history, the San Juan-Chama project may not deliver a full water supply in 2014. Whether the current shortage is a result of climate change or natural variability is uncertain, but this year’s shortfall could be “a harbinger of things to come,” the study’s authors wrote. The federal project diverts water from the mountains of southern Colorado through a series of tunnels beneath the Continental Divide. It allows New Mexico’s populated central valley to use some of New Mexico’s share of the waters of the Colorado River Basin. With river water and groundwater outstripped in recent decades by water demand in the Rio Grande Valley, the San Juan-Chama water has become an increasingly important backup supply, especially for Santa Fe and Albuquerque. The communities have separately spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build water treatment plants and distribution systems to deliver San Juan-Chama water to their customers. But both communities’ water agencies have already run into problems using the water, as drought and fire damage to Rio Grande watersheds have made it harder to use because of low river flows and ash-laden flows during the heat of summer, when it is needed most...more