SST Anomalies
NASA has put up a nice sea surface temperature page, for tracking El Niño in the Pacific and hurricane conditions in the Atlantic. You can see the El Niño warming.
Archive of posts filed under the climate variability category.
Drought and the Price of Wheat
Drought concerns (Australia, El Niño) continue to drive up the price of wheat: Wheat prices rose to a 10-year high on concern that drought will reduce supply from Australia, the third-largest exporter of the grain. Prices earlier soared by their daily limit for a second day and reached the highest since June, 1996, in Chicago. …
Piñon and drought
Great piece by Daniel Collins today on Pinus edulis (our beloved piñon) and decadal-scale climate variability. [T]his episodicity was driven not by natural population processes but by the progression of strong decadal wet and dry regimes, as evidenced by the tree ring data. During pluvial events (pluvial is the opposite of drought), abundant soil moisture …
The “Civil War Drought”
Talking about drought with Mom and Dad at dinner tonight (my poor family), I brought up the “Civil War Drought”, which hit the middle of North America in the late 1850s and ’60s. Dad wanted to know more about where it hit, and I wasn’t sure. I found out. I could just call and tell …
Brooks on Climate, Society and “Progress”
Nick Brooks kindly dropped by a few weeks back with a comment that’s worth pulling out and highlighting in its entirety. Brooks is assistant director of the University of East Anglia’s Saharan Studies Programme, and I’d commented on a paper of his on cultural response to climate change. Nick’s comment: Flattering that you guys are …
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Drought in Kenya
This is a great example of the issue Daniel Collins raised a couple of days ago in a discussion of the definition of drought – the extent to which the demand side of the equation must be taken into consideration. It’s a Reuters story about Prince Edward’s visit to northwest Kenya, “where drought has decimated …
ENSO Marketing
Heard on a local TV ad today: Skiers and snowboarders! El Niño is back, and it’s gonna be a great year!
Defining Drought
Daniel Collins has a nice post on the problem of defining drought.
ENSO Forecast
The latest ENSO forecast came out Thursday. No big surprises here: El Niño is strengthening, as expected, expected to continue into northern hemisphere spring 2007.
The Nature Problem
James Annan has had several posts that were spot on over the past year (see here and here) about what I call “the Nature problem” – scientific results that get hyped all out of proportion because they appear in Nature. My favorite case in point is the paper in Nature last year by Bryden et …