On Friday night, a summer monsoon storm hammered the Central Rio Grande Valley.--- Arroyos flushed water down into the Rio Grande, whose flows through Albuquerque had been low and slow. (The river has been drying south of the city since early June; last summer more than fifty miles dried. As I wrote here last month, the state's two largest rivers, the Rio Grande and the Pecos, consistently dry in the summer now.)
Because I'm obsessed—with things like drought and climate change—and also prone to blowing off work to hang out around the river, I snapped some pictures to see how quickly the flows diminish, even after a big storm event like that. You can see from the USGS graph the spike in flows on July 16—but I think it's cooler to watch the river itself.
All the photos are from the Alameda bridge on the north side of Albuquerque, from Saturday morning through Wednesday. It's also worth mentioning that as low as the flows look on Wednesday, they're much lower through Albuquerque and on to the south. Watch the two videos here:
