I added the year to the title of this blog post for the search engines. Because what’s going on right now applies to a lot of years since I’ve been writing about this stuff at Inkstain.

I’m gathering string today for the first Water Matters podcast of 2026 (available on Buzzsprout and wherever fine podcasts are downloaded). One string I pulled: total 2025 flow at Otowi, the gateway to New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande, was just 494,000 acre feet, the lowest since 1981 by my “danger John Fleck doing math” calculation.

Jan. 1 is early to be talking with any confidence about the coming year’s Rio Grande runoff, with another three-plus months of snow accumulation season ahead of us. And I walked to the market this morning to buy carrots in the midst of very light snow flurries! There’s snow on the Sandias! But I’ve got a podcast to help make, and yowza is the first-of-the-year runoff forecast from the NRCS lousy!

Median forecast for Otowi for the spring runoff: 48 percent of the 1991-2020 period of record. Best case (a one in ten chance on the wet side) is that we hit the average. Worst case I don’t even want to think about. San Marcial? Median forecast is just 17 percent of the 1991-2020 period of record. Worst case is so bad that the model breaks, spitting out a negative number.