Declining westerlies and Pacific Northwest hydrology: a hypothesis

Posted by jfleck on 1 December 2013, 2:13 pm

Charlie Luce from the U.S. Forest Service’s Boise Aquatic Sciences Laboratory and colleagues have a paper in the most recent Science examining the question of whether declining westerlies are behind the changing snowpack in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest: Decreases in lower-tropospheric winter westerlies across the region from 1950-2012 are hypothesized to have reduced …

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Giving thanks for snow

Posted by jfleck on 28 November 2013, 10:00 am

On this holiday, we can give thanks that the snowpack in the Upper Colorado River Basin is more than twice as big as last year at this time. It’s actually (#dontjinx) above average:

Municipal and agricultural use of Colorado River water: a comparison

Posted by jfleck on 25 November 2013, 9:58 am

Henry Brean reports on lawn removal efforts in Las Vegas, Nev.: Since the turf rebate program was launched in 1999, it has paid out $189 million in rebates and helped eliminate more than 167 million square-feet of thirsty grass, saving an estimated 9 billion gallons of water per year. Translated: a reduction of approximately 4,000 …

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Volvo Desert

Posted by jfleck on 24 November 2013, 8:08 pm

I had a couple of pieces in the newspaper last week about New Mexico’s long term water usage trends. I wrote the stories because the data, a time series I assembled by reviewing state water use reports, surprised me: Water for household use peaked in 1995 and has been declining ever since, according to state …

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New York Times green shift: the verdict

Posted by jfleck on 24 November 2013, 7:35 pm

Last spring, I wrote a half-hearted defense of the New York Times decision to shitcan its Green Blog and related decisions: A Green blog is a place where environmenty people go to look for environmenty news. If we’re doing it right, that sort of news is embedded in all sorts of stories rather than a …

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Desert Cadillac

Posted by jfleck on 24 November 2013, 3:34 pm

In Scottsdale, AZ, there’s a business called Desert Cadillac. It sells cars, apparently without irony.

Tree Rings’ Vegas Tale

Posted by jfleck on 23 November 2013, 5:14 pm

James May explains why you can’t use tree rings to date the age of a Las Vegas casino (and some other dendro science): Learn more: The Tree Rings’ Tale: Understanding Our Changing Climate (Worlds of Wonder)

Simon Rifkind’s great mistake and the shortfall on the Colorado River

Posted by jfleck on 17 November 2013, 5:00 pm

tl;dr – In 1960, U.S. Supreme Court Special Master Simon Rifkind made a fundamental mistake in calculating how much water was then available in the Colorado River Basin, and how much might be available in the future. The court, in its ruling in the case of Arizona v. California, accepted Rifkind’s math. The consequence is …

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Peak water, Arizona style

Posted by jfleck on 17 November 2013, 2:57 pm

Does this simply represent hardening of demand – the result of low-hanging conservation fruit being mostly all plucked? Or does this suggest arid Arizona is not headed toward the big water-driven economic collapse some people fear?

River restoration – it’s all about the groundwater

Posted by jfleck on 16 November 2013, 12:46 pm

I’m looking forward to Requiem for the Santa Cruz: An Environmental History of an Arizona River, a forthcoming University of Arizona Press book by Robert Webb, Julio Betancourt and colleagues. While we spend a lot of time talking about how to return water to rivers in the arid southwestern United States, this group of authors …

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jfleck at inkstain

A few thoughts from John Fleck, a writer of journalism and other things, living in New Mexico

Archive of entries posted by jfleck