Sunday Birdwatching
Chihuahua Plaza – Flight Originally uploaded by Miguel Navrot. From Miguel, circa 2000
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Nuclear Proliferation
There is much to recommend the nuclear proliferation piece in this morning’s New York Times by Bill Broad and David Sanger. It’s an excellent overview of the situation – how we got here and what can usefully be said about what happens next. I single out the following not because I think it’s the most …
Daybook
paper of the day: When and where might climate change be detectable in UK river flows?: “Even where climate driven changes may already be underway, losses in deployable resources will have to be factored into long-term water plans long before they are statistically detectable. Rather than an excuse for inaction, such insights should inform more …
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.
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 …
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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 …