Conrad Lautenbacher, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has apparently been reading Roger Pielke Jr.: The head of the nation’s weather and climate research agency says the biggest challenge facing the world is population growth and people’s desire to live in coastal areas where they can be endangered by storms. “I believe that …
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We’re standing on the brink of what ENSO forecasters call the spring barrier, the time of year when forecasting coming El Niño/La Niña conditions is hardest. But federal forecasters stuck their neck out today: In a weekly update, scientists at the NOAA Climate Prediction Center noted that as the 2006-2007 El Niño faded, surface and …
Zippy: Zippy: No overcoats in February. What’s up with that? Zerbina: Global warming. I’m lovin’ it!
reading: Em Hall’s High and Dry, a classic on New Mexico water that’s one of those books that everyone says you should read. I am. paper of the day: ENSO as a mediator of the solar influence on climate, Julien Emile-Geay and colleagues, in paleoceanography last month: “ENSO may plausibly have acted as a mediator …
China’s state news agency is reporting drought on the Yangtze: Falling water levels in China’s Yangtze River have left 1 million people short of drinking water, state media reported Monday. A severe drought has caused the water level in China’s longest river to plunge over the last two weeks, severely cutting water-pumping capacity, Xinhua News …
From Happisburgh, on Britain’s eastern coast, an interesting story about the way adaptation decisions end up being made not at some global level, but one crumbling seawall at a time: Ronan Uhel, a top official at the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen, said the situation in Happisburgh shows that governments and insurance companies have finally …
Tom Yulsman, in the comments below, raises an interesting question about yesterday’s release of the National Research Council Colorado River report: [N]othing in the NRC report sounded terribly new. We knew that droughts much worse than what we’ve experienced in the last 100 years have occurred in the past, we knew that the river is …
The NAS Colorado River report was released this morning: Recent studies of past climate and streamflow conditions have broadened understanding of long-term water availability in the Colorado River, revealing many periods when streamflow was lower than at any time in the past 100 years of recorded flows. That information, along with two important trends—a rapid …
Water in the Desert Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Mountainair, New Mexico, is not technically a desert. It averages nearly 15 inches (~40 cm) of precipitation a year. Nearly half of that falls in the summer rainy season, from late June into September, in big rapid thunderstorms. With essentially no surface water for miles around, the …
One useful measure of drought/pluvial conditions is soil moisture, which is critical both for non-irrigated farming and natural ecosystems. Today’s map is from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, which publishes a host of map products intended to illustrate what’s going on. Note that the map I’ve chosen does not represent absolute soil moisture, which is available …