The NAS Colorado River report was released this morning: Recent studies of past climate and streamflow conditions have broadened understanding of long-term water availability in the Colorado River, revealing many periods when streamflow was lower than at any time in the past 100 years of recorded flows. That information, along with two important trends—a rapid …
On the online disinhibition effect and Pat the Dog. Update: Pat the Dog responds
update: Looks like William Connolley, whose qualifications to deal with this issue are above reproach, has done a nice update on the Roger Pielke Jr. WikiThing. In a recent comment thread, I facetiously threatened to start a new Inkstian feature: I think I’m gonna start a new “Pielke watch” feature on Inkstain, where I highlight …
Water in the Desert Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Mountainair, New Mexico, is not technically a desert. It averages nearly 15 inches (~40 cm) of precipitation a year. Nearly half of that falls in the summer rainy season, from late June into September, in big rapid thunderstorms. With essentially no surface water for miles around, the …
dad_train_4 Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. It is very likely that this is the first view my Dad ever had of Albuquerque, riding the train across American more than three score years ago, a Pennsylvania boy on his way to California for the first time. I didn’t mean to get his reflection in the picture. In …
One useful measure of drought/pluvial conditions is soil moisture, which is critical both for non-irrigated farming and natural ecosystems. Today’s map is from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, which publishes a host of map products intended to illustrate what’s going on. Note that the map I’ve chosen does not represent absolute soil moisture, which is available …
Leslie Kryder, the grad student in the University of New Mexico’s water resources program who runs the New Mexico water mailing list, has started a blog on water-energy issues.
This morning in my rain gauge: 0.26 inch (0.66 cm) rain. This morning in my newspaper: Receding El Niño Leaving West Dry
Ave Marie Avenue Originally uploaded by c_foster. Not exactly a palindrome, but in spirit, very much so.
We haven’t done hockey sticks here in a while, but there’s a paper in the new Journal of Climate worth noting in this regard: High variability in reconstructions does not hamper the detection of greenhouse gas–induced climate change, since a substantial fraction of the variance in these reconstructions from the beginning of the analysis in …