About
What this is
New Mexico Water collects public measurements of the state’s water and turns them into pages you can read: how much water is in each river this week compared with a normal year, how often it runs dry, how warm and salty it is, how much rain and snow fell on its watershed, and which towns, farms, acequias and reservoirs depend on it.
It is a public-information project. Nothing here is an official forecast, a flood warning, or advice about water rights. For flood warnings, use the National Weather Service.
Where the numbers come from
The measurements come from stream gauges, reservoir records, weather grids and monitoring programs run by federal, state, tribal and university partners. Every page lists its own sources, and the credit page lists all of them with their terms.
We combine gauges from several agencies into one record for each river segment, and we compute weekly averages and percentiles against a 1991 to 2020 baseline. We remove values that cannot be right (for example, a river that reads a million cubic feet per second) and say so on each river’s data notes. We do not remove low or zero flows, because rivers in New Mexico really do dry up.
What the numbers cannot tell you
- A gauge measures one place. A river segment can differ from its gauge.
- Recent values are provisional: the agency that owns a gauge may revise them.
- “Below normal” compares this week with the same week in 1991 to 2020. It says nothing about why.
- Some rivers have few gauges or short records. We say how many weeks of data stand behind each number.
Who makes it
New Mexico Water is a volunteer project. The code is free software (source); the reports are shared under a Creative Commons licence described on the credit page. To report an error, use “Report a data problem” in the footer.