Drought in Ethiopia
ethio drought 15 Originally uploaded by aheavens. While we’re on the subject of drought, I stumbled on this, by Andrew Heavens, on Flickr. Heavens is a journalist in Ethiopia.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Climate Forecasts vs. Weather Forecasts
Andrew Dessler hauls out the old dice metaphor for a helpful discussion of why one might take long term climate forecasts seriously even if those silly meteorologists can’t get tomorrow’s weather forecast right: One simple way to think about the difference in predicting weather and climate is to think about rolling a six-sided die. Predicting …
Continue reading ‘Climate Forecasts vs. Weather Forecasts’ »
Defining and Measuring Drought
Following on Daniel Collins’ discussion of the different measures and definitions of drought, here are a few useful web pages that pull together various indices. One of the problems Daniel pointed out about my use of the Standardized Precipitation Index is that it only captures precipitation anomalies, which misses the temperature side of the equation. …
SST Anomalies
NASA has put up a nice sea surface temperature page, for tracking El Niño in the Pacific and hurricane conditions in the Atlantic. You can see the El Niño warming.
Phenology
Looks like the National Phenology Network is chugging forward: Over the past two years, Julio Betancourt of the Desert Laboratory has been collaborating with Mark Schwartz of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a group of scientists from various disciplines, federal agencies, academic institutions, and environmental networks to develop a wall-to-wall, coast-to-coast phenology observation network for …
Drought and the Price of Wheat
Drought concerns (Australia, El Niño) continue to drive up the price of wheat: Wheat prices rose to a 10-year high on concern that drought will reduce supply from Australia, the third-largest exporter of the grain. Prices earlier soared by their daily limit for a second day and reached the highest since June, 1996, in Chicago. …
Piñon and drought
Great piece by Daniel Collins today on Pinus edulis (our beloved piñon) and decadal-scale climate variability. [T]his episodicity was driven not by natural population processes but by the progression of strong decadal wet and dry regimes, as evidenced by the tree ring data. During pluvial events (pluvial is the opposite of drought), abundant soil moisture …
We Must Not Forget the Anna Politkovskaya’s
From Susan Moeller and Moisés Naím in today’s LA Times: There is no doubt that new technologies are changing the way all of us get and understand information. The trend is toward actively “searching” for what one wants to watch, read or listen to rather than passively taking in whatever editors or producers select. The …
Continue reading ‘We Must Not Forget the Anna Politkovskaya’s’ »
A Good Science Story
A friend sent along a link to Erika Niedowski’s piece in the Baltimore Sun over the weekend about a bunch of researchers studying extremophiles at the end of the Earth. No politics here, no big breakthroughs, just some delightful writing. As my friend said, “Sometimes a good science story is just a good science story.” …
The “Civil War Drought”
Talking about drought with Mom and Dad at dinner tonight (my poor family), I brought up the “Civil War Drought”, which hit the middle of North America in the late 1850s and ’60s. Dad wanted to know more about where it hit, and I wasn’t sure. I found out. I could just call and tell …