I’ve written at some length (and with some enthusiasm) about Phil Mote’s work on declining western snowpack. Here’s an interesting counterpoint: We conclude that only about one third of the gages exhibit significant trends with time but over half of the gages tested show significant relationships with discharge. Therefore, runoff timing is more significantly correlated …
paper of the day: More melting, this time in British Columbia. “The recent rate of glacier loss in the Coast Mountains (17.0 km?3a?1) is approximately double that observed for the previous two decades.” reading: Super Crunchers – yet more on why the algorithms are smarter than the humans and will eventually take over the world …
bosque-pond Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. The picture’s a tease. It was taken last October, so think of it as a hint of things to come. But the hints were there aplenty this morning on my bike ride along the riverside trail – little sprinklings of single yellow leaves on the cottonwoods. We’re still in summer, …
My colleague Sean Olson illustrates in this morning’s paper his grasp of the connection between water and growth: A request for water and sewer service for Westland DevCo’s southwest Albuquerque development was approved by the water board this week, even though it met heavy resistance from two city councilors. Michael Cadigan and Isaac Benton on …
On California drought.
View Larger Map Indeed, this is way easier than the way I’ve been doing it.
Via Google Maps Mania, word of a new tool to make it easier to embed a Google map in, for example, one’s blog. Let’s give it a try: View Larger Map
On geo-engineering: In pursuing the idea, Wingenter is entering a scientific-political minefield— the field of what is called “geo-engineering.” The most widely discussed geo-engineering proposal, pushed by Lowell Wood of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, involves a fleet of jets spewing aerosols that would deflect the sun’s rays, cooling the planet in the process. …
While we’re busy building pipelines to northern Nevada and figuring out how to desalinate brackish groundwater, a desert lizard called the “thorny devil” has opted for a simpler approach, according to a news piece in Science by Greg Miller: They discovered that the hinges contain tubelike channels about the width of one or two human …
Continue reading ‘Water in the Desert: Thorny Devil Edition’ »
The latest drought monitor notes the current state of our reservoirs here in the western U.S.: Despite the summer showers, many Western reservoirs remained unusually low, signaling ongoing hydrological drought. At the end of July, reservoir storage stood at 82 percent of average for this time of year in Arizona. Storage ranged from roughly two-thirds …
Continue reading ‘Drought: The Supply and Demand Question’ »