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” …
It was pouring rain when I left the office this evening, so I took surface streets rather than the messy freeway. The concrete arroyo by my work was running high as I passed, so I started slowing and watching every time I went over one. They were raging and roiling and doing their best to …
The Value of Water in Alternative UsesOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck. I recently scored a fascinating volume at the used bookstore: “The Value of Water in Alternative Uses, With Special Application to Water Use in the San Juan and Rio Grande Basins of New Mexico.” Published in 1962, it’s the result of a study of the …
I’m still on the steep lower slopes of the learning curve regarding the relationship between development and water, so I don’t have much to say about this except to say that it’s fascinating: Development of the 6,500-acre Quail Ranch is dead, at least for the time being. Sandia Properties has dropped plans to develop the …
More drought: Farmers have threatened to protest unless they receive more government help in coping with a prolonged drought that has destroyed millions of hectares (acres) of crops. The drought has cost Romania €1.5 billion (US$2 billion) in damages and has affected more than a third of the country’s arable land, an agriculture official said …