Southern Africa’s Hurting
Southern Africa’s been having a dry time of it in recent months. This is vegetation anomalies from NASA for March 2007. Big drop in maize production expected as a result. (Hat tip NASA Earth Observatory.)
Archive of posts filed under the climate variability category.
Acorns
Kit Stolz has a great look at drought in Southern California, with a particularly nice bit of business from Bill Patzert, the region’s most quotable climatologist: Patzert had a more personal reason to doubt the forecast. In his backyard he has an old oak tree, and for years he has noticed that the tree seemed …
Daybook
news of the warm: Climate change and national security in the Times of New York paper of the day: Schenk and Lensink discuss the difficulties associated with public discussion of greenhouse gas emission scenarios word of the day: fruiterer – one who sells fruit (this would be a subset, apparently, of greengrocer, sans veggies) reading: …
Drought’s Over!
Not really. It takes more than one storm. But I had 0.7 inch in my rain gauge this morning, and check out the snow down in Silver City. Using my new Pagano scale (the daily regression model run by Tom Pagano at the NRCS), the last week’s cool, wet weather has been worth 90,000 acre …
Land Use Change in the Amazon
Along the lines of the land use change issues Roger Pielke Sr. has been discussing, an interesting paper today in GRL looking at the differences between turning the Amazon rain forest into pasture, versus turning it into soybeans: Results show that the decrease in precipitation after a soybean extension is significantly higher when compared to …
Drought Looms!
From the Daily Express, across the rapidly rising pond, but adjacent to the smaller and rapidly shrinking pond, apparently: BRITAIN could be plunged into drought misery within months because of the record hot summer that’s on the way. Experts gave the warning yesterday as sailors, left, made the most of a full Bewl Water reservoir, …
Florida Drought
From Robert Clemson’s WaterCrunch, an update on Florida drought: Southwest Florida usually receives 42 inches annually, however, they are missing 13 inches of rain since 2006. The area is now entering a dry season after a year of rainfall so far below normal it ranks as the state’s third-driest year on record. Only four inches …
On the Plus Side….
Global warming could be economic boon for some: The Sierra snowpack could melt earlier and faster than before. Droughts could last longer. We could see more rainy days, or less. Storms could become more powerful. The science related to forecasting how global climate change will affect life’s most basic resource — water, and its supply, …
Dust Bowl
Dust BowlOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck. It’s reasonable to think that most of the folks in sub-Saharan Africa didn’t celebrate the release of the latest grim Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report by heading out to the ballpark last night. But that’s what Lissa and I did, the beneficiary of a pair of free tickets to …
The Coming Dust Bowl
Update: The paper is up, and Seager and his colleagues have put up an excellent web page explaining the results. Story’s up over at the work site on Richard Seager’s paper being published on line by Science today: Global warming is turning the Southwest into a permanent Dust Bowl, where the dry conditions of our …