Drought Chat
I’m the guinea pig for an on-line chat experiment at the office. My chosen topic is drought science, of course. Join us tomorrow (Thurs. 5/25) at 1:00 p.m. MDT, or send in your questions early.
Archive of posts filed under the climate variability category.
ENSO Forecast
The latest ENSO forecast from the U.S. government’s Climate Prediction Center shows continued uncertainty: Most of the statistical and coupled models predict ENSO-neutral conditions in the tropical Pacific through the end of 2006 (Fig. 5). However, the spread of these forecasts (weak La Niña to weak El Niño) indicates considerable uncertainty in the outlook for …
East of the 100th Meridian
I threw on my raincoat a little while ago so I could go for a quick walk before bed. I had to. We’ve had more rain here in Indianapolis in the last eight hours (0.90 inch) than we’ve had in Albuquerque in the last six months (0.41 inch). I can’t remember the last time I’ve …
ENSO’s Predictive Value
I’m traveling this week (see here), so my attentions are elsewhere. But with time to kill this morning, I was cruising some scientific back alleys and found this fascinating bit of business in GRL. It seems that ENSO, the best tool available for seasonal forecasting in some regions of the world, may not be working …
Snowpack and Groundwater
A new paper in JGR-Atmospheres raises some significant questions about snowmelt and groundwater in the western U.S. in a CO2-warmed world. Sam Earman of the Desert Research Institute and colleagues used isotopic analysis to try to tease out the relationship between snowmelt and groundwater recharge. They found that, while 25 to 50 percent of precipitation …
Drought in the West
Roger Pielke Sr. links to an interesting new paper about Holocene drought in the Rocky Mountain West, and makes a good point: A reoccurrence of prehistoric droughts today would result in enormous social and environmental consequences.
Water in the Desert
I did a couple of water-themed bike rides this weekend, one intentional and one accidental. I didn’t have the camera with me today, so you’ll have to take my word for it, but my chums and I rode up to the snow on the east side of the Sandias. By the cheap altimeter on my …
Beethoven and the Minnows
Breakfast with Beethoven this morning while reading an excellent article by my colleague Tania Soussan on the last decade’s history of water struggles on the middle Rio Grande. For readers outside the newspaper’s circulation area, the problem of climate variability hammered us in the mid to late 1990s when a two-decade pluvial switched off and …
In Praise of Benny Peiser
All four regular readers of this blog (Hi Mom!) are no doubt aware of my occasional consternation with Benny Peiser and his bollocksed-up reading of climate science. But despite that, I’ve been an enthusiastic consumer of Benny’s CCNet for years. I started reading it when I was writing a lot about near-earth objects – asteroids …
No Record
Some doofus at the local rag wrote a story yesterday about how we were on the brink of setting a record for the driest six months in Albuquerque history. Hah! I slipped in and out of sleep a couple of times early this morning to the gentle patterings of rain on the roof, and awoke …