Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine
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Archive of posts filed under the climate variability category.
In Praise of the Urban Heat Island
Freeze warning for parts of the Albuquerque area tonight, but it looks like we’ll be OK: ALBUQUERQUE VALLEY LOCATIONS ARE EXPECTED TO SEE FROST CONDITIONS DEVELOP WITH TEMPERATURES RIGHT AROUND THE FREEZING MARK FOR 1 TO 2 HOURS. OTHER AREAS ACROSS THE CITY WILL SEE TEMPERATURES IN THE 30S BUT ABOVE THE 32 DEGREE MARK …
Daybook
water politics: Looks like Sophie and the guy with the steely set in his jaw are going to stop Caesar’s evil plot to steal groundwater to build subdivisions. water politics II: Looks like Sophie and the guy with the steely set in his jaw may need to head over to Arizona next. water politics III: …
Daybook
reading: Tired of printing out PDF’s, I’m placing my order today for the IPCC Working Group I report paper of the day: “A Method of Approximating Rainfall over Long Periods and Some Results of its Application,” A.E. Douglass, Science, Jan. 3, 1913. Sorry, nothing to link here, you’ll just have to take my word for …
Alabama Drought
A remarkable story out of Alabama, where Alexander City seems to be quite literally running out of water: “The water is so low the pumps are shutting down on us,” said Eugene Mahan, superintendent of water treatment for the system, which provides drinking water to about 50,000 to 60,000 people in east central Alabama, including …
Quote of the Day
But the question “Has man inadvertently changed the global climate, or is he about to do so?” is quite legitimate. It has been widely discussed publicly – unfortunately with more zeal than insight. Like so many technical questions fought out in the forum of popular magazines and the daily press, the debate has been characterized …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Been said before, but bears repeating: Tom Swetnam’s Senate testimony Monday: Global warming is making Western wildfires worse, a top fire expert told members of the U.S. Senate on Monday. Combined with a century of firefighting that has left some forests choked and overgrown, along with people building more and more communities at the forests’ …
Disappearing Tundra
The highest mountain “tundra” terrains of the Western United States are disappearing because of warming temperatures, according to a new paper by Henry Diaz and Jon Eischeid: In the last 20 years (1987–2006), rising temperatures have caused a significant fraction of these areas to exceed the 10°C threshold for alpine tundra classification. The result has …
Death Valley Rain
Death Valley averages about two inches (50 mm) of rain a year, but it’s been on the dry side there in 2007, making what happened there this week all the more remarkable: Prior to today the yearly rainfall total in Death Valley was 0.10 of an inch. As of 2 p.m. PT, Death Valley had …
The Arctic and Drought
Robert Krier has a fascinating piece in this morning’s San Diego Union Tribune suggesting a linkage between arctic melting and drought in the Southwest: Three years ago, computer forecast models predicted that in 2050, the reduced ice mass would cause climate shifts that would result in a drought in the western United States. But the …