Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
On California drought.
Archive of posts filed under the water category.
Water in the Desert: Thorny Devil Edition
While we’re busy building pipelines to northern Nevada and figuring out how to desalinate brackish groundwater, a desert lizard called the “thorny devil” has opted for a simpler approach, according to a news piece in Science by Greg Miller: They discovered that the hinges contain tubelike channels about the width of one or two human …
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Drought: The Supply and Demand Question
The latest drought monitor notes the current state of our reservoirs here in the western U.S.: Despite the summer showers, many Western reservoirs remained unusually low, signaling ongoing hydrological drought. At the end of July, reservoir storage stood at 82 percent of average for this time of year in Arizona. Storage ranged from roughly two-thirds …
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Water in the Desert: Cocoposts Edition
Mike Campana seems to be channeling Coco in this post about Las Vegas: It may be time to tie land use planning directly to water planning. The subject is Las Vegas, which is running out of water. Or, more accurately, is running into more people. There’s plenty of water for fewer people. The subject is …
Water in the Desert
John_Sadie Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Lissa and I took Sadie for a walk this morning to the ponds out in the bosque beyond Tingley Beach. They were finished in 2005, and are really starting to grow up. Baby cottonwoods line the edge, with cattails growing like bonkers at the southern end. We saw what we …
Not Quite So Great
Jim Belshaw sends along a Felicity Barranger story on the dwindling of the Great Lakes. Per usual, climate change is blamed, though other hypotheses are also on the table: Although the drop in levels in all three lakes is variously ascribed to climate change or new rainfall patterns, evidence is growing that people caused some …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Desalination Edition
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 …
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Water in the Desert
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 …
Atacama
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.
Zimbabwe
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 …