I blogged earlier today at work about the latest ENSO assessment from the Climate Prediction Center, and said this: We’re at the point in the year where forecasting is hard, so the computer models used to try to get a handle on where this is headed are all over the map. It’s the conventional wisdom …
The reason I’ve been tinkering with the Salton Sea story is its (potential?) centrality to the story of climate variability and the allocation of the Colorado River’s water. (I say I’m writing a book about “drought,” but I’m really trying to deal with questions of how people here in the West have responded over the …
My two best riding buddies, Jaime and Steve, are doing the Phoenix Ironman Sunday, which I think is nutty. (Why get off a perfectly good bike and run 26 miles? Wouldn’t it be a lot quicker to just keep riding? I mean, I can understand why you have to swim the water bit, ’cause youre …
Cyclists notice the wind, perhaps like pilots or kite fliers, probably more the most other folks. On my favorite rides, I know where all the flagpoles are – especially early, near my house, which I need to use to get my bearings. There’s the humongous US flag at the big freeway interchange in the center …
A nice bit of business from Anjali Nayar’s NYTimes profile of Gavin Schmidt: “The climate is like the city,” he said as he gestured at the scene around him. The city is made up of millions of people making individual decisions: when to wake in the morning, what time to go to work, where to …
Climate model fidelity and projections of climate change: Relative entropy, which is a measure of the difference between two probability distributions, has been calculated for the simulations of the climate of the 20th century from 13 climate models and the observed surface air temperature during the past 100 years. This quantity is used as a …
Blast to Simulate Nuke Explosion (sub. req.): Pentagon researchers plan to set off a simulated nuclear blast in the Nevada desert in June as part of their search for a better way to destroy buried enemy bunkers, according to federal documents. A Defense Nuclear Threat Reduction Agency spokeswoman would neither confirm nor deny the nuclear …
N.M. Scientists Mimic Global Warming to Study Long-Term Effects (sub. req.): As if Earth isn’t warming fast enough, Jim Elliott wants to speed things up. To do it, Elliott has fashioned what look like 20 oversized bed frames on a remote patch of desert south of Belen to create an extra bit of global warming …
Praise be.
OK, it’s April 1, and this is no joke. The official runoff forecast, done by genuine professionals, will be out next week, but we can get a pretty complete picture from the Snotel data. These numbers are river basin snow water equivalent content, in percent of April 1 average: Upper Colorado River: 111 Upper Rio …