When Milly et al. pronounced the death of stationarity in Science magazine last year, lots of folks in the water world took notice. Stationarity is the idea that the envelope of variability we’ve seen is the envelope of variability we’ll get in the future. Not so in a climatically changing world? Now come Gabriele Villarini …
Continue reading ‘If Stationarity Dies, How Will We Know?’ »
Here’s a nice way of thinking about aridity: If all the water that flows in each river during an average year were spread evenly over the area drained by the river, the depths would be: Delaware 20.9 in.; Columbia 13.1 in.; Mississippi 6.7 in.; Colorado 1.15 in. Source: Water and Choice in the Colorado Basin, …
I’m reading Frank Waters’ The Colorado, which offers an odd vantage point on the history of the river basin. It was written in 1946 when, as Waters points out in an introduction written when it was republished in the mid-1980s, Phoenix was the only city in the basin of any heft whatsoever. It is clear …
In thinking about the effects of climate change on our arid landscape, it’s easy to get distracted by precipitation numbers. Will it go up or down? How much? What’s the error bar look like? But in recent years, the research community that looks at the Southwestern U.S. has been banging away on “P minus E”. …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: It’s All About the Evaporation’ »
I’m in the midst of a story for the newspaper about drought and climate change that looks at the importance of temperature. It is not simply whether more or less rain falls, but also how much evaporation there is. This is the critical message from Richard Seager’s 2007 paper about the permanent Dust Bowl. That …
There are supply droughts, where the amount of rain falling from the sky drops precipitously, and the amount of water evaporating from plants and transpiring from their leaves, rises. And there are demand droughts, where the main problem is not in the supply of water nature offers, but in the way we use it. The …
Continue reading ‘What Kind of Drought is South Texas Having?’ »
An explanation (justification?) for why the NM water reporter is paying so much attention to the Vegas water story. (It’s a bit of a fib. Really it’s just a fascinating story, and the NM angle is cheap. But this is just between you and me. You won’t tell my editors, right?)
When an organization dedicated to the world’s water problems conducts a survey that concludes people care a lot about the world’s water problems, it’s good to accept the results with some caution. That caveat notwithstanding, the results of this survey are nevertheless not surprising: The survey, commissioned by Circle of Blue and conducted by Toronto …
When we talk about “water wars” in the United States, things like what is now happening in Atlanta, we’re not really talking about shooting wars. But there’s are widespread fears that globally, water wars will be one of the defining structures of 21st century conflict. Not so, suggests a new paper in the Journal of …
Albuquerque’s on the brink of New Mexico’s largest sewage reclamation project, taking 2,500 acre feet per year of water from the city’s wastewater treatment plant outflow and using it to water parks and golf courses. All well and good. Sounds like a great idea to put wasted water to use. But, as I tried to …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Albuquerque’s Sewage Reclamation’ »