Staci Matlock at the Santa Fe New Mexican wrote a good primer over the weekend about the difference between water rights and actual water here in New Mexico: Real water: That’s wet water, the stuff one needs for drinking, washing clothes, growing food, building houses and cooling power plants. Paper water: The piece of paper …
Some smart person at NOAA’s climate prediction center has done a lovely mashup of two maps I regularly look at to track drought: the weekly drought monitor and the USGS streamflow map.
Matthew Nisbet nails the New York Times’ hanging curve ball in his analysis of the problems of the collision between science and journalism, quoting Andrew Revkin’s fabulous line about “the tyranny of the news peg.” The context is a piece by the always provocative Gary Taubes about the problems of epidemiological research. I’ve given a …
Cropped hawk photo Originally uploaded by mjhinton. Among other things while we were gone, Mark Justice Hinton got this fabulous picture of a hawk at our neighborhood park.
Ocotillo Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Lissa and I just back from a lovely weeks’ trip around Arizona. The main purpose was a visit to the University of Arizona and environs in Tucson for a project we’re working on. We spent a delightful day at the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research, made a pilgrimage to Tumamoc …
Continue reading ‘Water in the Desert: Arizona Road Trip Edition’ »
What happens when what used to be abnormally dry becomes the new normal? Drought will become a redundant term as Australia plans for a permanently drier future, according to the nation’s urban water industries chief. And climate experts yesterday predicted the present drought would continue, signalling a cruel summer for farmers and sparking fears of …
Via Strange Maps
Embudo Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Driving up to Taos last weekend to see art, Lissa and I stopped at Embudo in the Rio Grande Gorge to see the oldest continuously operated stream gage in the United States. The river was running about 450 cfs while we were there – not a lot of water, but …
This week’s drought tour of America takes us to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where they just completed the driest August on record. It is an old river town, with its downtown opening onto a bend in the Mississippi River. For those interested in Western lore, it’s where John Wesley Powell spent a summer early in his …
Staci Matlock has a nice story in the New Mexican about water problems in the San Luis Valley, on the upper Rio Grande in Colorado: Until five years ago, most people thought water in the upper one-third of the San Luis Valley was hydrologically disconnected from the river. It was called a closed basin — …