On our summer monsoon Winter droughts apparently bring summer rains in New Mexico. That, dumb luck and a bit of mystery are scientists’ best explanations for this year’s prodigious monsoon, which looks like one for the record books. “We’re on track for our wettest summer ever,” said Charlie Liles, head of the National Weather Service’s …
The New Mexico Office of State Engineer (the water people) issued a report last week looking at climate change impacts and vulnerabilities. From the story by Tania Soussan and myself: Global warming is likely to increase the risk of drought in New Mexico over the next century, and mountain snowpacks anywhere south of Santa Fe …
Andrew Dessler adds a helpful coda to his comments in my newspaper story of a couple of weeks back: I agree with Pielke Sr. that assessments have to include the range of opinions held by the majority of the scientific community. If half of the community says one thing and the other half says something …
Over where they pay me, I’ll be doing an on line chat tomorrow at 1:30 p.m. MDT on the science of the monsoon. If needed, I’m fully prepared to defend the ill-defined term.
Last February, Kit Stolz blogged about evidence that California’s fire-bringing Santa Ana winds (SAO is the acronymic jargon) were shifting later in the year. There’s a new paper in GRL suggesting a link between climate change and the shift: This initial analysis shows consistent shifts in SAO events from earlier (September–October) to later (November–December) in …
The always insightful* Coco offers some helpful backstory to the institutional arrangements responsible for sucking water out of Albuquerque’s low-lying neighborhoods: One of the strongest reasons behind having growth management is to plan public infrastructure investment to assure adequate funding for replacement and repair of things like aging infrastructure that serves existing neighborhoods – like …
More discussion over on the Fix about my July 23 story on climate science.
animas_la_plata Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Calling Durango, Colorado, “the desert” is a bit of a cheat. Located on the edge of the San Juan Mountains, it averages 20 inches or so (50 cm) of precipitation a year, well above what might formally qualify as desert. But Durango sits at a fulcrum in the complex interplay …
Today’s Journal letters page has some discussion of my climate science story from a couple of weeks back. I apparently don’t have many fans: John Fleck probably has a PR job on George W. Bush’s staff waiting for him after the spin he put on global warming science in the Journal. Hey, at least they’re …
Monday afternoon, I was sitting in a meeting of federal drought scientists up in Santa Fe when Nora pinged me this text message: Yes, it is raining really hard here. It was something of an understatement. When I got up Tuesday morning and checked my rain gauge, it had recorded 1.93 inches in the previous …