An Admission of Erratum

Following my last post that provided an update on the status of water use and reservoir levels in the Colorado River basin, Rebecca Kimitch of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California kindly got in touch to explain that I got my number wrong for MWD’s projected water use in 2020. I misinterpreted the way in which MWD reports their water-use numbers, but the good news is that Rebecca alerted me to this website that publishes the Bureau of Reclamation’s forecasts for current-year water use.

The corrected forecast for MWD’s use of the Colorado River this year is 828,648 acre-feet. That’s a 50% increase from last year, not a doubling!

I’ve made changes to the blog post, including some modifications to the two graphs below which indicate (with stars) this year’s estimated water use for each entity. The Lower Basin’s total water use is projected to increase by 4% over last year.

My sincere thanks to Rebecca for helping me to correct my mistake.