Interesting paper in GRL by Lobell et al. suggesting that temperature under doubled CO2 could be cooler in irrigated regions than the climate models suggest. Because of the relatively small area of the planet under irrigation, the overall effect is small, but the potential effect on food-production seems worthy of better understanding: The reduction of …
One of my frustrations with the climate blogging world is the relative abundance of climate wars-type discussion and the relative dearth of discussion of climate science. Sean Davis has started a new blog that looks promising in this regard: Head in a Cloud. Great early discussion, including a nice piece by Andrew Dessler on work …
Fascinating paper in GRL suggesting that the massive Three Gorges Dam in China is making rain more in the mountains to the west, and rain less in the area of the dam itself: The independent satellite data sets and numerical simulation clearly indicate that the land use change associated with the TGD construction has increased …
I didn’t have a chance to do a story for the newspaper on the new Science paper by Westerling et al.[1] on wildfires and climate change, so I just got around to reading it this evening. In a sense, it seems like a bit of a no-brainer. Common sense would suggest that when temperatures are …
Interesting El Niño forecast out today from the Climate Prediction Center: Most of the statistical and coupled models predict slightly positive SST anomalies (ENSO-neutral to weak El Niño) in the Niño 3.4 region through the end of 2006. These forecasts are consistent with the recent build up in upper-ocean heat content along the equator. I …
0.58 inch after midnight at my house, most of it between 4:30 and 5:30 a.m. Out at the airport, the National Weather Service got 0.69.
The azaleas in Seoul are blooming earlier than they used to, according to a report by Chang-Hoi Ho and colleagues in an upcoming issue of the International Journal of Climatology. This is one of those wonderful phenological studies in which researchers piece together a historical record of when plants flower, a relatively sensitive indicator of …
One of climatologists’ predictors of whether or not we’re going to have a big monsoon is the date of onset. Early onset generally means a wetter monsoon.[1] We’ve got no crisp definition here in Albuquerque (and, in fact, the monsoon onset isn’t very crisp here), but in Tucson they’ve developed a very precise definition based …
Going through some papers on my desk, I ran across this quote scribbled on a piece of paper: Many droughts will occur; many seasons in a long series will be fruitless; and it may be doubted whether, on the whole, agriculture will prove remunerative. That’s John Wesley Powell describing life in what he called the …
Rio-Grande-after-rain Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. My first visit to Albuquerque, at least the first that I remember, was some time in the mid-1970s. I was a teenager, and we stayed with friends in Dietz Farm, in a house in the shade of the cottonwoods that backed up on the ditch along the east side of …