Tom Yulsman, in the comments below, raises an interesting question about yesterday’s release of the National Research Council Colorado River report: [N]othing in the NRC report sounded terribly new. We knew that droughts much worse than what we’ve experienced in the last 100 years have occurred in the past, we knew that the river is …
The NAS Colorado River report was released this morning: Recent studies of past climate and streamflow conditions have broadened understanding of long-term water availability in the Colorado River, revealing many periods when streamflow was lower than at any time in the past 100 years of recorded flows. That information, along with two important trends—a rapid …
On the online disinhibition effect and Pat the Dog. Update: Pat the Dog responds
Water in the Desert Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Mountainair, New Mexico, is not technically a desert. It averages nearly 15 inches (~40 cm) of precipitation a year. Nearly half of that falls in the summer rainy season, from late June into September, in big rapid thunderstorms. With essentially no surface water for miles around, the …
dad_train_4 Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. It is very likely that this is the first view my Dad ever had of Albuquerque, riding the train across American more than three score years ago, a Pennsylvania boy on his way to California for the first time. I didn’t mean to get his reflection in the picture. In …
Leslie Kryder, the grad student in the University of New Mexico’s water resources program who runs the New Mexico water mailing list, has started a blog on water-energy issues.
This morning in my rain gauge: 0.26 inch (0.66 cm) rain. This morning in my newspaper: Receding El Niño Leaving West Dry
Ave Marie Avenue Originally uploaded by c_foster. Not exactly a palindrome, but in spirit, very much so.
My first serious exposure to Roger Pielke Jr.’s work was at an American Meteorological Society meeting in Albuquerque in 2001. He gave a talk laying out the basic thrust of his hurricane vulnerability argument: that societal changes (essentially building stuff on the beach) are the dominant variable in the societal hurricane risk equation. It’s an …
On paleoclimate in caves: In most parts of the world, New Mexico included, there have only been rain gauges and thermometers to record the weather for a little more than a century. To figure out what happened before, scientists are exploiting a growing arsenal of tricks, from layers of ice in Antarctica to corals that …