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 …
This morning in my rain gauge: 0.26 inch (0.66 cm) rain. This morning in my newspaper: Receding El Niño Leaving West Dry
We haven’t done hockey sticks here in a while, but there’s a paper in the new Journal of Climate worth noting in this regard: High variability in reconstructions does not hamper the detection of greenhouse gas–induced climate change, since a substantial fraction of the variance in these reconstructions from the beginning of the analysis in …
My first serious exposure to Roger Pielke Jr.’s work was at an American Meteorological Society meeting in Albuquerque in 2001. He gave a talk laying out the basic thrust of his hurricane vulnerability argument: that societal changes (essentially building stuff on the beach) are the dominant variable in the societal hurricane risk equation. It’s an …
On paleoclimate in caves: In most parts of the world, New Mexico included, there have only been rain gauges and thermometers to record the weather for a little more than a century. To figure out what happened before, scientists are exploiting a growing arsenal of tricks, from layers of ice in Antarctica to corals that …
Much interesting discussion today about the issue of “framing” in the politics of global climate change – see, for example, Ellen Goodman’s column in the Boston Globe, along with useful discussion by Matthew Nisbet and Tom Yulsman. Useful stuff, but ignores the “sleeveless tops in February” frame. 🙂 From the Fix: What’s with the weather …
This’ll probably come as good news to my drought-plagued Australian friends. El Niño’s just about done. For us here in the U.S., the precipitation pattern – dry in Arizona, wet in Seattle – suggests that no teleconnection really got engaged in any sort of a big way, reflective of either how weak it was, or …
Alameda DamOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck. John Wesley Powell would be proud. From his 1878 “Report on the Arid Lands“: There are two methods of storing the waste waters. Reservoirs may be constructed near the sources of the streams and the waters held in the upper valleys, or the water may be run from the canals …
If you want to understand the contradictions of life in 21st century west, there are two books you must read: John Wesley Powell’s Report on the Arid Lands, and Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. You also must understand that both were deeply insightful, and that both were also full of crap, and thinking through …