New analysis of the tricky problem of quantifying California’s groundwater depletion uses data from NASA’s GRACE satellite to come up with some startling numbers: Here we use 78 months (October, 2003–March, 2010) of data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite mission to estimate water storage changes in California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin River …
Continue reading ‘Pumping California’s Central Valley Dry’ »
Anne Jefferson has a look at last year’s Pakistan flooding that explores the intriguing question of how you get people to listen to forecasts. It turns out that they had forecasts in enough time to take action to reduce risk, but the forecasts were apparently ignored: So the Pakistani government did forecast the flood – at …
From the morning paper, a look back at how New Mexico’s natural gas outages happened (sub/ad req): Eventually, as the cold gained the upper hand and gas lines emptied, crews closed valves, cutting one community after another off of the gas grid — first Tularosa, then down to La Luz and Alamogordo on the gas …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Brutal Cold, Brutal Choices’ »
With a nuclear power plant proposal taking shape in Green River, folks in Utah are trying to get out in front of the energy-water nexus. From the Salt Lake Tribune: In parts of the country with dependable water supplies, nuclear power naturally fits with plans to boost the nation’s investment in clean energy sources. While …
From this morning’s newspaper, explaining our remarkable cold in a continental context (sub/ad req): [I]t was as if someone left a giant freezer door open and all the arctic cold leaked out. While New Mexico lay beneath a mass of arctic air 30 or more degrees colder than normal, central Canada saw temperatures 20 degrees …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Explaining the Cold’ »
Three interesting case studies this week in the use of social media in my journalism (or in one case just my life), which I hope might be of some interest to others (especially colleagues who have been skeptical of its utility – you know who you are). New Mexico had a historic storm this week, …
Continue reading ‘Social Media and the Journalist’s Toolkit’ »
We’ve been remarkably cold here in New Mexico this week. Yesterday, it turned into a major infrastructure problem, which forced me to very quickly get up to speed on how our state’s natural gas infrastructure works, on account of because a bunch of people had theirs turned off. From the morning paper (sub/ad req): The …
The terrific scientist-writer Anne Jefferson, who studies what happens when water meets earth, has an excellent post up today summarizing flooding around the world. The floods in Queensland have gotten the most attention in country, because (I suspect) the people are like us, plus they have the affluence and technology to post cool flood videos …
Continue reading ‘In natural disasters, it’s the poor who suffer’ »
The bemused Brits at the Economist paid Pat Mulroy a visit: The main reason why Lake Mead, currently only 40% full, has been getting emptier is a decade-long drought. Whether this is a cyclical and normal event, or an early sign of climate change, is unclear. But even if the drought ends, most scientists think …
Continue reading ‘Having to rip out your lawn is not the worst thing that can happen’ »
Struck by the numbers on dairy industry groundwater contamination in New Mexico, I’ve been poking around in the regulatory issues involved. Here’s a bit of what I found (sub/ad req): Dairies are found throughout New Mexico, but are especially concentrated in the southeastern part of the state, where growth of industrial dairy operations has made …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Dairies and Groundwater’ »