A brief newspaper item from the Helena Independent Record [thanks to Brown and Caldwell's Rocky Mountain Water News] caught my eye this week. The headline read: Montana to Reconsider Rural Water Rules.

The story byAP reporter Matthew Brown begins:

Montana officials said Wednesday they will rewrite a rule that allowed tens of thousands of rural homes to be built without water permits, but i ... read more >>

Al Gore, who days ago called for mass demonstrations on climate change, is also arguing that the failure of Congress to pass a global warming bill is “already costing our nation billions of dollars.” ... read more >>

This paper assesses the hydrological response to scenarios of climate change in the Okavango River catchment in Southern Africa. Climate scenarios are constructed representing different changes in global mean temperature from an ensemble of 7 climate models assessed in the IPCC AR4. The results show a substantial change in mean flow associated with a global warming of 2 °C. However, there is cons ... read more >>

I have seen pictures of the flooding in Pakistan, read articles, but I have not seen any Indus River flow graphs yet.

Thanks to data provided by the Pakistan Meterological Department, I was able to put this graphic together this morning. Click on the image to enlarge. It shows hydrographs from different points along the Indus River for the month of August. WOW! ... read more >>

I was sent a review copy of this book (which just went on sale), and here goes: Peter Rogers is a Professor of Environmental Engineering and Urban Planning at Harvard. Susan Leal is the former GM of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. She was therefore managing SF's tap and wastewater.

Their subtitle is "the looming crisis and solutions to conserve our most precious resource," and ... read more >>

Water resources management has been shaped by a variety of paradigms reflecting the evolution of government policies and transient societal values. Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) became a predominant management framework in the 1990s. The Human Rights-Based Approach (HRBA) to development has also emerged recently as an influential approach in the water sector. IWRM and the HRBA to d ... read more >>

Emily Green's excellent weekly summary of the happenings in the world of water. ... read more >>

Five years after Hurricane Katrina's deadly lessons, the Army Corps of Engineers still hasn't confirmed which Mississippi River levees must go higher to better protect against hurricane surges pushed out of the Gulf of Mexico, but testing is about to begin on a new method of raising the ones that are ultimately determined to be low. ... read more >>