How Dry Our Winter
From the National Weather Service, a pile o’ facts on New Mexico’s record-setting dry winter.
Archive of posts filed under the climate variability category.
Eight Degrees of Separation
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 …
Drought, Food, Africa
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 …
Dry
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 …
Global Warming and Allergies
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?
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
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.
Santa Ana Winds
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 …
Drought Update
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 …
A New Hockey Stick
Timothy Osborn and Keith Briffa have a new paleoclimate reconstruction coming out in tomorrow’s Science with a familiar shape but an interesting new twist:
Global Cooling
The usual caveats apply: just a single number, more to understanding climate change than surface temp., etc. NASA’s GISS team has posted its global January number, with fodder for everyone to misinterpret. On one side, you could argue it’s cooling. (You’ve got to be careful in picking your starting year to make that case, but …