Everyone’s talking about desalination lately as a source of “new” water here in the southwest. The picture at right is El Paso’s new desalination plant, which opened last week. It’s the largest inland desalination plant in the United States, capable of delivering a substantial fraction of El Paso’s water. In this morning’s Journal, I join …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Desalination Edition’ »
As deserts go, the place I live now is modest. Albuquerque is in the 10 inch (25 cm) per year range. The deserts of my youth, where I developed my fondness for arid landscapes, were the real deal – creosote and year-round sun. I can remember once as a teenager sitting with a friend on …
Dr. Water goes to the place that has none: Copiapo is one of the Atacama’s “wetter” places, as they told me they last had rainfall in 1997 – a whopping 60 mm (2.4 inches) in one day that year. The long-term annual average (meaningless, really) is 10 mm or 0.4 inches.
Drought has been an issue in Zimbabwe, but this Famine Early Warning System alert suggests climate is a relatively minor player in the country’s impending food crisis: This year’s cereal production is expected to meet only 55 percent of Zimbabwe’s requirements, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Programme. The 2006/07 …
Added Laura Paskus’s High Desert Reports to my blogroll and feed reader. She’s a freelance journalist here in New Mexico who does a good job of paying a lot of attention to issues I’m trying to keep better track of. I’m a bit slow on the uptake, but I reached the point where I said …
The hovering in ENSO-neutral conditions continues, with the climate prediction center saying there is a slightly greater than 50% chance of La Niña developing during the next couple of months. The spread of the recent model forecasts range from ENSO-neutral to La Niña, with a majority of dynamical models indicating a more immediate transition to …
According to this story, they’ve got the water in Zimbabwe, but they don’t have the electricity to pump it to the fields: Rensen Gasela, a farmer in Midlands Province and former chief executive for cereals at the state-run Grain Marketing Board, told IRIN, “We have enough water in the dams but we do not have …
Pumping crap into the air to cool things off has been suggested as a way of countering global warming. A new paper by Kevin Trenberth and Aiguo Dai at NCAR makes this look like a bad idea. They used actual volcanic eruptions as an analog and looked at their effect on the hydrologic cycle: Following …
Watercrunch points out the significant expansion of drought conditions in Alabama in this week’s drought monitor: The Southeast: With scattered rain last week in the Southeast, drought conditions did not improve, but instead expanded in some areas. Even with recent rains, many recording stations were below normal for July. Mississippi is a good example of …
Aquafornia points to a piece about California water that has parallels here in New Mexico: The future for agriculture rests on the availability of water. Plain and simple. Much has been written about the competition for water with the competing interests of farmers pitted against urbanites and food processors vying for water against other “sexier” …