A: When April 1 falls on a Monday. That’s the conclusion of a clever bit of work by Tom Pagano, former NRCS forecaster who used to do the Rio Grande forecasts before he went on to bigger and better things. “Bigger and better” has included a stint in Australia and a current world tour of …
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I’d love to have been in on the meetings that lead to this paper. “I agree, we really need a better way to get to the question of whole-ecosystem metabolism and basin-scale carbon budgets. Lava Falls will be critical.”
I had to laugh when I looked at today’s long-lead precipitation forecasts from the Climate Prediction Center. Those little splotches of color are forecasts. All that white is what the forecasters call “equal chances”, which basically means they have no idea other than historical climatology what might happen. In other words, it could be wet, …
This feels a bit unseemly, but I’m frankly enormously proud to have won a Society of Professional Journalists “Top of the Rockies” award for my work last year on forest health, fire, politics and policy in the mountains of the West: The driest January through June in New Mexico history came down to this: For …
Continue reading ‘unseemly bragging and links to my award-winning work’ »
The ubiquitous Connie Woodhouse (one of the stars of The Tree Rings’ Tale) has been working with a team using tree rings to reconstruct the flow of the Indus River: Dr. Woodhouse did the reconstruction of the water flow level in River Colorado in the US. She is working on a similar project for River …
Tom Swetnam, head of the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research at the University of Arizona, who helped hugely with my book The Tree Rings’ Tale, has been named a Regent’s Professor, “an honored position reserved for faculty scholars of exceptional ability who have achieved national and international distinction.” He’s a great guy, well deserved recognition.
In my my tree ring book, I focused nearly entirely on their use in studying climates. But tree rings are good for so much more, as in this example: Earlier this week, Royal Commission staff visited the Conwy valley, to work with Margaret Dunn, the director of the Dating Old Welsh Houses project in evaluating …
When I was thinking about how to write a book about climate science for kids, measuring the weather made sense to me. As a journalist, it’s my favorite science to write about because of the opportunities to tie science to everyday experience. And any kid can set up a thermometer and rain gauge in their …
I first noticed it while I was out in the mountains of northern New Mexico back in the mid-1990s with Karl Karlstrom, a University of New Mexico geologist. I had tagged along on a summer field camp mapping exercise for a feature I was doing, and spent a good part of the day shadowing Karl …
River forecaster Tom Pagano, late of Portland, Ore., and Australia, is on the road working on a book about river forecasting, so naturally he’s ended up in Thailand. In a post today, he talks about a language dilemma forecasters face: A phrase like the “worst case scenario” is a double-edged sword. This is the kind …