I’ll be I’ll be yammering about the Colorado River basin, sneaky droughts, and megadroughts with the folks at NIDIS (the National Integrated Drought Information System): As the Colorado River Basin experiences 2020’s “sneaky drought” amid a long term pattern that looks increasingly like one of the region’s millennial “megadroughts” that last decades, water managers are …
Ben Cook, Justin Mankis, and Kevin Anchukaitis have an extremely helpful review paper in Current Climate Change Reports (ungated, thanks) sorting out what we do and don’t know about the impact of climate change on droughts. The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report was cautious in its assessment of our knowledge of drought, reporting only “low confidence” …
Continue reading ‘Drought, climate change – we know more than we used to’ »
Tom Philp had a great piece in Water Deeply last week about the language we use: Water policy becoming a prisoner of its own limited vocabulary, particularly when it comes to the weather. Here is a case that “drought” and “normal” belong in the dustbin of history, for their overuse can lead to the wrong conversation. …
Continue reading ‘“drought” – Philp on weather, water, and yesteryear’s language’ »
It finally rained yesterday morning in Albuquerque, a bit after 8 a.m., ending a 96-day dry streak. The water in the bottom of my gauge looked like strong tea as the rain washed out three months’ dust, and the relief was not measurable, but large. I ended up with 0.09 inch (2.3 mm) at my …
As I mentioned, this is the driest start to a water year in a century in Albuquerque. The preliminary Jan. 1 runoff forecast from the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service bears this out. The forecast, based on snow measurements, is stark. NRCS has 40 years of snow records, and for many sites, this is the …
The last time we had any measurable precipitation at Albuquerque’s airport weather station, where we keep the records, was Oct. 4. That’s 90 days, the driest start to a water year since 1917-18.
Putting together a lecture for tomorrow for UNM Water Resources Program students on “drought” – how we define, measure, and think about it – I noticed that Donald Trump, during a visit to North Dakota, seems to have brought up the issue, to wit: Trump on North Dakota’s drought: “It’ll disappear, it’ll all go away.” …
Just 5 percent of New Mexico ranked this week as “abnormally dry” in the federal Drought Monitor. That is the least dry the state has been since the monitor began publishing its weekly drought condition reports in January 2000.
Speaking earlier this month at the University of Colorado’s Martz Conference, Brad Udall offered what amounted to a bibliography, both helpful and deeply unnerving, of recent scientific literature documenting what we have learned in recent years about climate change and water in the Western United States, and what it tells us about our future prospects. …
Continue reading ‘Brad Udall’s western water climate change bibliography’ »
We also note that migrants are very strongly attracted to areas experiencing drought. Drought are associated with low precipitation and higher-than-average temperatures, two amenities that attract residents (even if they may be detrimental for local agriculture). That is from The Effect of Natural Disasters on Economic Activity in US Counties: A Century of Data, an NBER paper …
Continue reading ‘US drought migration patterns are not what I expected’ »