William Connolley stumbles into the minefield that is defining the Australian drought: Australia hasn’t got a mega-drought, only a 10-15% reduction in rainfall. Many commenters complain, mostly offering up the absolutely useless evidence offered by alarmist news stories from the Australian press. Lab Lemming nails it by noting that drought is best defined by societal …
I wish I’d had a camera, but I’ll have to attempt a word picture instead. I was out riding in the foothills with some friends yesterday morning, doing repeats up the road to the Elena Gallegos picnic area. It’s a gentle and persistent climb that winds up an alluvial fan splaying out of the Sandias. …
Kit Stolz has a great look at drought in Southern California, with a particularly nice bit of business from Bill Patzert, the region’s most quotable climatologist: Patzert had a more personal reason to doubt the forecast. In his backyard he has an old oak tree, and for years he has noticed that the tree seemed …
Not really. It takes more than one storm. But I had 0.7 inch in my rain gauge this morning, and check out the snow down in Silver City. Using my new Pagano scale (the daily regression model run by Tom Pagano at the NRCS), the last week’s cool, wet weather has been worth 90,000 acre …
From the Daily Express, across the rapidly rising pond, but adjacent to the smaller and rapidly shrinking pond, apparently: BRITAIN could be plunged into drought misery within months because of the record hot summer that’s on the way. Experts gave the warning yesterday as sailors, left, made the most of a full Bewl Water reservoir, …
Piping Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. This doesn’t much have the look of the dramatic engineering works you typically think of when you think of western water projects, but at the end of the line, you’ve always got to get the water out that last few miles. In this case, it’s new pipe being laid about …
From Robert Clemson’s WaterCrunch, an update on Florida drought: Southwest Florida usually receives 42 inches annually, however, they are missing 13 inches of rain since 2006. The area is now entering a dry season after a year of rainfall so far below normal it ranks as the state’s third-driest year on record. Only four inches …
Global warming could be economic boon for some: The Sierra snowpack could melt earlier and faster than before. Droughts could last longer. We could see more rainy days, or less. Storms could become more powerful. The science related to forecasting how global climate change will affect life’s most basic resource — water, and its supply, …
Dust BowlOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck. It’s reasonable to think that most of the folks in sub-Saharan Africa didn’t celebrate the release of the latest grim Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report by heading out to the ballpark last night. But that’s what Lissa and I did, the beneficiary of a pair of free tickets to …
Update: The paper is up, and Seager and his colleagues have put up an excellent web page explaining the results. Story’s up over at the work site on Richard Seager’s paper being published on line by Science today: Global warming is turning the Southwest into a permanent Dust Bowl, where the dry conditions of our …