Drought Map Mashup
Some smart person at NOAA’s climate prediction center has done a lovely mashup of two maps I regularly look at to track drought: the weekly drought monitor and the USGS streamflow map.
Archive of posts filed under the climate variability category.
Water in the Desert: Arizona Road Trip Edition
Ocotillo Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Lissa and I just back from a lovely weeks’ trip around Arizona. The main purpose was a visit to the University of Arizona and environs in Tucson for a project we’re working on. We spent a delightful day at the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research, made a pilgrimage to Tumamoc …
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“permanent drought”
What happens when what used to be abnormally dry becomes the new normal? Drought will become a redundant term as Australia plans for a permanently drier future, according to the nation’s urban water industries chief. And climate experts yesterday predicted the present drought would continue, signalling a cruel summer for farmers and sparking fears of …
Dry Down the River
This week’s drought tour of America takes us to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where they just completed the driest August on record. It is an old river town, with its downtown opening onto a bend in the Mississippi River. For those interested in Western lore, it’s where John Wesley Powell spent a summer early in his …
Water in the San Luis Valley
Staci Matlock has a nice story in the New Mexican about water problems in the San Luis Valley, on the upper Rio Grande in Colorado: Until five years ago, most people thought water in the upper one-third of the San Luis Valley was hydrologically disconnected from the river. It was called a closed basin — …
Thinking About Future Climate
This paper by Martin Beniston on recent temperature extremes is a great example of the sort of exercise we need at the regional scale to help societies think about climate change. Switzerland has been hotter than Hades lately (bonkers 2003, record July 2006, near record winter 2006-07). Attribution is tricky, but Beniston neatly sidesteps the …
August Rainfall
Just totaling up my rainfall to send in to the National Weather Service: 1.4 inches (35.5 mm) in August. The official Albuquerque total, out at the airport, was 1.05 inches (26.7 mm). Around town, from the COCORAHS network, totals ranged from a low of 0.54 inch (13.7 mm) out on the southwest mesa to a …
Urban Heat Islands
Let’s play the urban heat island game, shall we? This is not about whether global warming is real or not. I’m prepared to stipulate that the various groups analyzing global temperatures are doing a fine job of correcting for the UHI in their global temperature trend calculations. This is about the way we’re creating cities …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Notes on a water meeting
Climate Change and Colorado Water
Based on all the reporting I’ve been doing for the Albuquerque Journal, it seems to me that you could easily substitute “New Mexico” for “Colorado” in this story: The issue is critical in Western states such as Colorado, where even in wet years almost every river already is “over-appropriated,” with insufficient water to satisfy demand. …