Mount Holyoke’s “Academic Minute” has a nice interview with Park Williams, who’s been using tree rings to flesh out the story of the current drought in the context of historic droughts, as it pertains to forests in the Southwest: I study the year-by-year records left by these rings, and they tell a fascinating story more …
Amid the rhetoric of doom, California agriculture has so far been growing its way through drought: Even as many farmers cut back their planting, California’s farm economy overall has been surprisingly resilient. Farm employment increased by more than 1 percent last year. Gross farm revenue from crop production actually increased by two-tenths of 1 percent …
Continue reading ‘California ag showing remarkable resilience’ »
For the first time since January 2011, less than half of New Mexico is classified in “drought” this morning in the weekly federal “Drought Monitor” (“drought” is the oranges and browns): Driving back across the state from a meeting in Arizona last week, things looked greener than I’ve seen in a long time, though I …
Continue reading ‘For the first time since 2011, less than half of New Mexico in drought’ »
Water from our recent storms, combined with the some clever twiddling by federal and local water managers, is pushing the Rio Grande through Albuquerque in the next few days to the highest spring runoff levels we’ve seen since 2010. Water managers are taking advantage of the May storms to add some water and create a …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico’s Rio Grande, on the rise (finally)’ »
California’s water problems will never be solved Faith Kerns and Doug Parker argue, because cities and farms will always expand to the edge of available supply, overshoot, and then face trouble during the dry times: There are other arenas where this phenomenon is well understood. For example, when it comes to freeways, congestion leads to demand …
If you follow weather forecasts, you’ve heard about “relative humidity” (RH). But it’s one of those maddeningly less-than-useful measures of our weather that probably needs to be just retired. That’s wishful thinking, of course. But in an interesting introduction to their latest research into the increasing dryness of the air and the risk of fire …
Daniel Crawford and Scott St. George at the University of Minnesota have collaborated on another fascinating attempt to use music to communicate data about our warming world: Todd Reubold at Ensia has more on the project.
update: Jeff Lukas, in the comments, notes that I missed something important, which is the distinction between statewide averages and the east-west precip divide. As he correctly points out, that statewide blob of wet-looking Colorado hides the fact that it’s been extremely wet to the east, and relatively dry west of the continental divide. Here’s …
Continue reading ‘Warm in the West, but not as dry as you might have thought’ »
At the risk of nickel-and-diming you with bad forecast news, today’s Bureau of Reclamation mid-month report is bad forecast news. April-July flow into Lake Powell is now forecast to be just 3.4 million acre feet, 47 percent of average (pdf). That’s down from 3.75 maf (52 percent) just two weeks ago. Runoff for the full …
Continue reading ‘Lake Powell spring runoff forecast this year now less than half of average’ »
This paper is measuring stuff in Australia, but seems to mimic the dropoff in runoff we’re seeing on the Rio Grande and other western U.S. rivers compared to the precipitation deficits we’re experiencing: Annual rainfall and runoff records from south-eastern Australia are used to examine whether interdecadal climate variability induces changes in hydrological behavior. We test …
Continue reading ‘Precipitation-runoff relationships in sustained drought’ »