Drought Portal
The folks working on the National Integrated Drought Information System have opened up a nice new web portal in an attempt to start integrating some of the disparate information collected on drought throughout the U.S. government.
Archive of posts filed under the climate variability category.
Melting Glaciers
Johannes Koch of Simon Fraser University says “many” glaciers in Western Canada are the smallest they’ve been in the last 7,000 years: Glacier retreat in western Canada and other regions is exposing fossil tree stumps, soils, and plant detritus that, until recently, were beneath tens to hundreds of metres of ice. Dating of these fossils …
Dave: Take Shorter Showers
North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley has asked my friend Dave to take shorter showers: The Governor of North Carolina, Mike Easley, announced on Tuesday he is calling on citizens across North Carolina to cut water consumption by 50 percent between now and Halloween. I guess you could think of this as a big science fair …
Climate Change and California Fires
Aquafornia has a great compilation of reporting on the question of a climate change link with respect to the California fires. The bottom line? Yes! No! Maybe! The most compelling research to me on this question is Westerling et al. in Science last year. Aquafornia quotes an LA Times piece with a nice summary of …
Revkin
Andrew Revkin, the New York Times’ climate beat reporter, has a blog. (Hat tip David.) Update: Malcolm points out that Revkin’s blog is on the Internet. 🙂
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Atlanta drought in a New Mexico newspaper: The problems New Mexicans face are different than those of Atlanta. We use groundwater for most of our cities’ drinking water, an option Atlanta does not have. In addition, the arid climate of the West is much more variable than in the South. In response, we have built …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
On climate change’s impact on New Mexico: Diminishing water supplies as a result of global warming could cost New Mexico’s economy hundreds of millions of dollars a year over the next century, according to a new study. The study, to be unveiled at a news conference this morning in Albuquerque, found that an already arid …
More Georgia Drought
PHDI, North-Central GeorgiaOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck. I spent some time yesterday looking for better measures than simple precipitation to describe the current drought situation in Northern Georgia. This is from a data set of Palmer Hydrologic Drought Index for north-central Georgia from the National Climatic Data Center. One of the problems with using precipitation alone, …
Questions About the Georgia Drought
A list of questions I have about the Atlanta running-out-of-water situation. I pose them here, lazy-blog style, hoping someone out there knows the answer: to what extent does the Atlanta water supply have multi-year storage capabilities – to store extra during wet years for use during dry years what’s the relevant time scale for understanding …
More Georgia Drought Numbers
Reader Tim rightly points out that my Georgia rainfall graph is the state as a whole, while the drought is primarily confined to the northern part of the state. Here’s the north-central Georgia climate division. (The northwest and northeast graphs look quite similar.) I think the point is similar. Depending on what time scales you’re …