The following appeared in my twitter feed last night: Could it be that the legendary “forecaster” is resorting to twitter spamming to drum up business? (I have suggested the good folks at Twitter look into that possibility.) I counted 115 identical messages that went out at the same time last night in his twitter feed. …
While I’ve been writing about fire history in the southwest, the issue is coming up all over. As in this last week, from Texas A&M, on using tree rings to tease out fire history in the Appalachians: By piecing together the fire-scar record from numerous trees, he and his students and collaborators learned that fires …
Continue reading ‘Tree rings and fire history in the Appalachians’ »
I am a weather nerd. So it was with great excitement that I unpacked my new official CoCoRaHS RG202 4″ Rain Gauge this evening. It replaces an identical old one that I put up in the back yard in September 1999 when I joined the local National Weather Service office’s CityNet group of volunteer observers. …
For the current water year, Oct. 1, 2010, through the end of August, I’ve had 4.39 inches (11.15 cm) of rain at my house in Albuquerque’s near northeast heights. That’s 51 percent of the mean going back to the 1999-2000 water year. Just one of the months, December, was above my long term mean, and …
As Irene prepares to drop by and visit our eastern neighbors, Kevin Anchukaitis points to this: Evidence of historical landfalling hurricanes and prehistoric storms has been recovered from backbarrier environments in the New York City area. Overwash deposits correlate with landfalls of the most intense documented hurricanes in the area, including the hurricanes of 1893, …
Continue reading ‘On the relevance of paleoclimate studies’ »
Paul Miller and Tom Piechota have assembled a new set of data suggesting a decline in precipitation in the West, and more particularly in the basin that feeds the Colorado River. For this work, they looked at SNOTEL stations, the network of snow measurement sites run by NRCS that feed data into streamflow forecasts. For …
For grins, I just checked the latest climate data for Baton Rouge, which is in the grip of a fierce drought. July’s been a decent month for them. Still below normal, but better than it has been. From July 12-14, they got 2.84 inches of rain. It’s the last day of the month, so I …
Maggie Koerth-Baker in BoingBoing yesterday: In reality, global cooling was never a broadly accepted Theory. It’s reasonable to assume that a good chunk of Americans never heard about it at all. And global cooling never had the support of most climate scientists, let alone scientists in other disciplines, like biology and public health, which …
In this epic dry year, we’ve heard a lot of “worst since the Dust Bowl” comparisons. I’ve been arguing that it’s a bogus comparison – one horribly dry year against a decadal scale phenomenon. But there’s a second reason, nicely captured by Kevin Welch today in the Amarillo Globe-News: Farming practices imported from the Midwest …
Over at the work blog today, I shared some comments from Julio Betancourt, a USGS ecologist who knows his way around arid climate, about our recent fires and their connection to climate change. It’s something he wrote a month ago, before Las Conchas, but seems relevant, and I share here with his permission: I think …