Poking in the garden this morning, I’d never have guessed without actual rain gauge data that we just finished a wet month. It’s really dry out there. But drought is a funny thing, eh? 0.55 inches (1.4 cm) of rain at our house in May was the first above-average month since November. My total …
Inspired by these insanely cool California drought visualizations from Circle of Blue, here’s a drought history in New Mexico over the last 14 years:
I’ve tried lots of different things to try to communicate the inherent uncertainties (at all time scales) in the forecast business. Here’s another stab at the problem: I feel a little like a cheap carnival barker foretelling you this, but FYI, it looks like El Niño is coming. New Mexico water managers, grappling with their …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: El Niño and the carnival barker’ »
From the morning paper: New Mexico’s current drought, with dwindling water supplies and increasing wildfire risk, is a taste of our future under climate change, according to a sweeping new federal report released Tuesday. While climate’s natural ups and downs are playing a major role in our current drought, rising greenhouse gases increase the odds …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the National Climate Assessment’ »
Here’s a statistical oddity. Through April 14, we’ve measured 0.4 inches (10 mm) of precipitation at the National Weather Service’s Albuquerque gauge in 2014, about 23 percent of the long term mean. This is the seventh straight year that Albuquerque has been below average through April 14. 2007 is the last calendar year in Albuquerque …
From the work blog, natural variability is driving New Mexico’s drought, greenhouse gases are making it worse.
Variability is at the core of water management. When it’s on the dry side of the range, some folks are willing to pay a lot for water. But if that involves big capital expenditures, are you willing to sit on the cost when things get wet? Brett Walton explains how this is playing out in …
Continue reading ‘the value of water depends on how dry it is’ »
One of the casualties of drought is the piñon in the mountains of New Mexico. I took this picture back in February in the Sandias, the mountains on the eastern edge of Albuquerque. Where you see snow the slopes are generally north-facing. No snow is south-facing, and that’s where you see brown trees. I tweaked …
My first memory of weather is the fruit frost report. I’m not sure how old I was, certainly younger than five. It was the early ’60s, in the big living room of Dick and Elizabeth Fleming’s, a grand old farmhouse in the middle of an orange grove in Riverside, in southern California. The Flemings were …
Danger. Journalist doing math. There be dragons: Otowi is the Rio Grande’s gateway to central New Mexico. Located between Santa Fe and Los Alamos, it’s the point where the river has picked up pretty much all the snowmelt it’s going to get, absent some minor contributions from the Jemez Mountains. It’s also a key point …