One of the significant areas of climate research right for us in the southwestern United States involves work on modeling the large (spatially and temporally) droughts that are so significant in long term human and ecosystem dynamics. These are the ones that are not just one-year whammies, but linger for decades, like the drought of …
From Jonathan Overpeck last month in Nature (gated): The complexity of these megadroughts still defies complete explanation and yet it implies that unusually persistent anomalies of sea surface temperature can combine with amplifying changes in vegetation and soil to drive droughts that — if they happened today — would outstrip many of our institutional capacities …
Charlie Luce from the U.S. Forest Service’s Boise Aquatic Sciences Laboratory and colleagues have a paper in the most recent Science examining the question of whether declining westerlies are behind the changing snowpack in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest: Decreases in lower-tropospheric winter westerlies across the region from 1950-2012 are hypothesized to have reduced …
Continue reading ‘Declining westerlies and Pacific Northwest hydrology: a hypothesis’ »
Brett Walton explains new research on the water lost in the Great Texas Drought of 2011. It’s a lot. But the thing that caught my eye was where most of the water loss occurred: “Groundwater depletion can be significant locally. However, by taking Texas as a whole, most water depletion comes from soil moisture during …
Continue reading ‘Texas drought: it’s all about the soil moisture’ »
A new paper in Nature by Jinbao Li and colleagues, using tree rings to create an El Niño/La Niña (the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO) reconstruction of unprecedented fidelity, suggests an increase in ENSO in the second half of the 20th century: Our data indicate that ENSO activity in the late twentieth century was anomalously high …
Continue reading ‘Tree rings suggest strong ENSO response to greenhouse forcing’ »
From Prescott, Michael Kodas helped the Newshour audience this evening understand the complex interplay of climate change, a century of fire suppression and rapid growth at the wildland-urban interface: Watch Hotter Temps, Drought, Development Drive Fire Problems on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
The folks at the University of Colorado’s Colorado River Governance Initiative have a clever idea to keep the Upper Basin states from getting screwed by climate change. Their new Upper Basin Voluntary Demand Cap white paper (pdf) offers a solution path for one of the stickiest problems in future Colorado Basin water management under climate change. In …
I take my rainfall measurements at 7 a.m., so June’s over for me. I’m happy to report that our 0.14 inch (36 cm) of rain puts us over an inch for the Oct-now “water year”! We’re planning a fireworks celebration for later this evening, out by the dry brush in the far back corner of …
The NOAA Automated Atmospheric River Detection system has picked up a storm with some potential in the Pacific, which at this point (five days out) seems to be pointed at California: That’s the forecast image for Monday morning. According to Michael Dettinger, who was fielding my questions this afternoon on Twitter, AR storms are very …
Continue reading ‘A California “atmospheric river” storm, in June?’ »
With 0.02 inch (0.5 mm) of rain yesterday afternoon, we’ve finally hit 1 inch (25 mm) at our house for the 2012-13 (Oct.-Sept.) water year. Then it rained again this afternoon, making this the first time we’ve had consecutive days with measurable precipitation since Dec. 15-16. Through the end of May, we’re at 21 percent …