Sorry, that was a clickbait headline. Let me walk it back: Odds shifted slightly toward a wetter Southwest monsoon this summer! The usual forecast explainer: this shifts the odds from the climatological one-in-three-years-is-wet statistical binning to a 33-40 percent chance of wet in the light green area, upwards of 40 percent in the dark …
Darren Ficklin at Indiana University has a new paper exploring trends in drought in the United States which notes that the trends are not universal: [F]our regions of increasing (upper Midwest, Louisiana, southeastern United States (US), and western US) and decreasing (New England, Pacific Northwest, upper Great Plains, and Ohio River Valley) drought trends…. But …
Michael Wines in Monday’s New York Times: The perils of drought are on ample display along the Rio Grande, where a rising thirst has tested farmers, fueled environmental battles over vanishing fish and pushed a water-rights dispute between Texas and New Mexico to the Supreme Court. But you can also see glimmers of hope. Albuquerque, …
Continue reading ‘On the Rio Grande drought, not exactly optimism, but not pessimism either’ »
Checked in this evening on the snowpack map, which I haven’t been watching closely. Yow, what I missed! On the left is percent of average for March 1, on the right is this morning’s percent of average: Here’s what that looks like summed up across the Colorado River Basin above Lake Powell:
Despite the drier conditions and the apocalyptic headlines, California is unlikely to become a parched, uninhabitable hellscape, experts say. Tia Ghose in LiveScience
“Over this bridge drought refugees are crossing the Colorado River into California.” – Dorothea Lange, 1935 One more great bit of American history as I get ready to head off to Yuma. I love this picture. From the Library of Congress’s remarkable collection of Dorothea Lange’s work in the American Desert during the Depression.
David Victor on the need for better inclusion of social science in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: The IPCC must overhaul how it engages with the social sciences in particular…. Fields such as sociology, political science and anthropology are central to understanding how people and societies comprehend and respond to environmental changes, …
Continue reading ‘On climate, a call for more social science’ »
Yesterday’s executive order from California Gov. Jerry Brown (pdf here) illustrates a crucial issue about water governance, the issue of the scale at which we manage our water. The headline news from Brown’s announcement – “First Ever Statewide Mandatory Water Reductions.” But what does “mandatory” mean here? Here’s the explanation from Craig Miller, who’s covering California …
Continue reading ‘California drought: Jerry Brown doesn’t have a knob to turn’ »
Craig Miller at KQED has a useful roundup of what sort of shortfalls California water users might see this summer as a result of drought: Ag: “More than 400,000 acres of farmland were fallowed last year because of scarce water. Credible sources have estimated that figure could double this year.” That’s in the neighborhood of …
Continue reading ‘Where will California’s water shortfalls hit?’ »
California farmers by now have a pretty clear picture of what their water supply situation is going to be this year, whether it’s reservoir and irrigation system surface delivery, or groundwater pumping. The U.S. Department of Agriculture today released projected acreage for the state’s major field crops (pdf) that reflects farmers’ resulting choices: corn: 430,000 …