I didn’t have a chance to do a story for the newspaper on the new Science paper by Westerling et al.[1] on wildfires and climate change, so I just got around to reading it this evening. In a sense, it seems like a bit of a no-brainer. Common sense would suggest that when temperatures are …
Interesting El Niño forecast out today from the Climate Prediction Center: Most of the statistical and coupled models predict slightly positive SST anomalies (ENSO-neutral to weak El Niño) in the Niño 3.4 region through the end of 2006. These forecasts are consistent with the recent build up in upper-ocean heat content along the equator. I …
0.58 inch after midnight at my house, most of it between 4:30 and 5:30 a.m. Out at the airport, the National Weather Service got 0.69.
In which I spend my Fourth of July following the mayor of Albuquerque around backstage at a rock show: But there His Honor was Tuesday evening, with his rock star shades and a real roadie to plug in his borrowed red Peavey electric guitar, solo, banging out the opening chords to “Louie Louie”— the most …
The azaleas in Seoul are blooming earlier than they used to, according to a report by Chang-Hoi Ho and colleagues in an upcoming issue of the International Journal of Climatology. This is one of those wonderful phenological studies in which researchers piece together a historical record of when plants flower, a relatively sensitive indicator of …
One of climatologists’ predictors of whether or not we’re going to have a big monsoon is the date of onset. Early onset generally means a wetter monsoon.[1] We’ve got no crisp definition here in Albuquerque (and, in fact, the monsoon onset isn’t very crisp here), but in Tucson they’ve developed a very precise definition based …
In Frank we trust (a great old video clip of Frank Zappa debating freedom of speech – hat tip Ed)
Going through some papers on my desk, I ran across this quote scribbled on a piece of paper: Many droughts will occur; many seasons in a long series will be fruitless; and it may be doubted whether, on the whole, agriculture will prove remunerative. That’s John Wesley Powell describing life in what he called the …
Earlier this week, Kevin Vranes helped explain something that had been puzzling me: how members of Congress could use appropriations bills as vehicles to make policy. The item at hand for me was the Yucca Mountain language included in the most recent Senate version of the Energy and Water appropriations bill, which I’d been writing …
Rio-Grande-after-rain Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. My first visit to Albuquerque, at least the first that I remember, was some time in the mid-1970s. I was a teenager, and we stayed with friends in Dietz Farm, in a house in the shade of the cottonwoods that backed up on the ditch along the east side of …