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 …
[View the story “Thirsty Gecko’s Megadroughts” on Storify]
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.