The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.
We got 12.86 inches of precipitation in 2015 (32.66 cm) at the Heineman-Fleck house in Albuquerque. Average going back to 2000 is 9.72, which qualifies by the arbitrary 10 inch mark as a desert.
Archive of posts filed under the climate variability category.
Prepping the snow shovel
When I was in newspaper journalism, I always viewed the holiday season as a target of opportunity. Papers were relatively fat, propped up by holiday ad content, and news was thin, so editors were desperate for copy. As the end of the year approached, I’d queue up story ideas, knowing that it was a chance …
Ocotillo in the snow
It snowed overnight in Albuquerque.
New Mexico is “drought free”, sort of
For the first time since Nov. 30, 2010, New Mexico has been categorized as entirely free of “drought” in this morning’s federal Drought Monitor. 26 percent of the state remains “abnormally dry”, but none of the state is in any of the monitor’s formally designated drought categories. This does not mean that we are free …
Stationarity, recurrence intervals, and our perception of weather and climate extremes
Robert Osborne and Jonathan Overpeck published interesting pieces in the last couple of days reinforcing an important point about our perceptions and understanding of recurrence intervals in big weather and climate events. Osborne is in the southeastern U.S. and is writing about flooding (short term) while Overpeck is in the southwest and is writing about drought (much …
Librarian love for “The Tree Rings’ Tale”
I’m happy to note that my book The Tree Rings’ Tale: Understanding Our Changing Climate (Barbara Guth Worlds of Wonder Science Series for Young Readers) was a November pick of the month by librarians at the Clovis-Carver Library in Clovis, New Mexico. Not too early to think about a Christmas gift for that bright young …
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Climate change, the Rio Grande forecast problem, and the death of stationarity
Laura Paskus takes us this morning to the mountains of northern New Mexico, where the snow is melting earlier than it used to, and less of the ensuing runoff is making it into our Rio Grande: [A]s bleak as southwestern springtime stream flow forecasts have been in recent years, scientists at the University of New …
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Climatology of the coming extremely large El Niño
The late Chris Farley, famed climatologist, on the power and importance of El Niño: Never gets old.
A promising seasonal forecast for the Colorado River Basin
The federal Climate Prediction Center’s seasonal forecast, out this morning, looks promising for the Colorado River Basin: These forecast maps can be visually deceptive. The greens mean a shift of odds toward wetter weather, not a forecast that we should expect wetter weather. Dice, loaded slightly in our favor. You can see all the precip …
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El Niño and New Mexico’s Rio Grande
Does the looming El Niño mean we can expect a big year on the Rio Grande? Not necessarily. The scatter in the data is huge, but hidden in the data is a bit of a nudge in the direction of wet: That’s native flow at Otowi, the key Rio Grande measurement point north of Albuquerque. There’s …