THE BEGINNING: In 2008, Tim Barnett and David Pierce, two
climate researchers from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography,
printed a provocative paper entitled “When will Lake Mead go
dry?” which appeared in Water Resources Research (Vol 44). This
was the first study that applied models of global climate change
to address the current and future state of the public water
supply provided by the Lower Colorado River Basin, whose runoff
storage is in Lake Mead, a lake created by the Hoover Dam
construction and located near Las Vegas, Nevada. At the present
time, the Lower Colorado River Basin provides water for the 30
million people living in the Southwest and at the present rate
of growth, this system will have to provide water for 38 million
inhabitants by the year 2020, a date that is just around the
corner. Major cities served by the Lower Basin runoff, include
Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, San Diego and their
surrounding regions. Mexico also gets water from this system.
MISMEASUREMENT OF RIVER FLOW