On hurricanes and drought (sub. req.): The same global forces that unleashed Katrina on New Orleans may be quietly sapping the West of its water. Drought and hurricanes seem to go hand-in-hand, said Julio Betancourt, a drought researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey in Tucson. Betancourt is among a growing number of researchers pointing to …
Apropos a long and predictably unproductive comment thread, a new study published on line by Science today: Using predicted precipitation changes, we calculate that decrease in perennial drainage will significantly affect present surface water access across 25% of Africa by the end of this century. I don’t want to make too big a deal of …
From the National Weather Service, a pile o’ facts on New Mexico’s record-setting dry winter.
Steve McIntyre has been playing a fun sort of “degrees of separation” game, identifying members of climate science’s “hockey team” based on coauthorship of paleoclimate papers and using their team membership to disparage their work. I’ve not found it to be a particularly useful or persuasive argument, and Tim Lambert has pointed out the inconsistency …
In keeping with Kevin Vranes’ dictum that “it’s up to the bloggers to highlight the papers that didn’t make Science, Nature, JAMA or NEJM” because those half-wits in the mainstream media won’t, here’s an interesting paper on climate variability and food in Africa. Leif Christian Stige of the University of Oslo and colleagues used crop …
Some stuff I wrote elsewhere on how dry it is (sub. req.): If we don’t get any rain in the next week— a good bet— the past four months will go into the record books as the driest winter in Albuquerque history. With 0.14 inches since Nov. 1, Albuquerque is on the verge of shattering …
OK, if you smarty-pants scientists wanna do something useful with your time, here’s what I need to know. What effect will global warming have on my allergies?
Some snark from me on my Journal blog about Benny Peiser’s reaction to the new WMO handy hurricane science guide. Some actual non-snarky thoughtful discussion between Benny and myself in the comments on Roger Pielke Jr.’s post on this.
The Santa Ana winds are a fixture of my Southern California childhood – heavy, warm and dry with the hint of smoke and danger. I remember them as a fall phenomenon, though a more careful reading of the literature suggests they really spanned the winter and sometimes stretched into spring. According to Kit Stolz, they’re …
More than halfway through our winter precipitation season, the snowpack is pathetic and the runoff forecasts dismal. (courtesy Western Regional Climate Center) Tania Soussan has more in this morning’s Journal (sub. req.): Several places set new record lows for snowpack as of Feb. 1. The forecast calls for spring river flows to be 27 percent …