Speaking of southwestern drought (weren’t we just talking about this?), the monthly ENSO update shows more signs of creeping toward La Niña. Hurricanes, droughts, plagues of locusts, as well as some weak but suggestive evidence that the Yankees do better during La Niña years.
DitchOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck. I’m stretching the point a bit, but standing at the edge of an alfalfa field in Albuquerque’s South Valley this afternoon, I was reminded of Bruce Smith’s description in last Friday’s Science of the co-evolution of humans, dogs and the bottle gourd: In Asia, for example, the domestication of two utilitarian …
Andrew Revkin on the First World-Third World adaptation dichotomy: our robust First World economic engines are both causing climate change and providing us the resources to adapt to the damage it causes. The Third World? Not so much: Michael H. Glantz, an expert on climate hazards at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who has …
Bettina Boxall writes in the LA Times about “the perfect drought”: Nature is pulling a triple whammy on Southern California this year. Whether it’s the Sierra, the Southland or the Colorado River Basin, every place that provides water to the region is dry. It’s a rare and troubling pattern, and if it persists it could …
Apropos of nothing except that I’m fascinated by the interplay between agriculture and urbanization in the West, I ran across this data this evening in the Census of Agriculture (and if I blog it here, I can Google it and find it later): Irrigated agricultural acreage in Bernalillo County (that’s the county in which Albuquerque …
We’re seeing some extraordinary snowmelt right now. Coming a month early, it’s setting this-date-in-history records up in the Rio Grande Gorge: Never, in more than a century of record keeping, have we seen a March snowmelt like that flowing down the Rio Grande Gorge in northern New Mexico right now. Record warmth across the mountains …
This is a fascinating harbinger of things to come on the Colorado River, as the dry side of the natural range of variability collides with rapidly growing water demands: A plant built to remove salt from highly saline irrigation runoff has sat idle in this southwestern Arizona community for more than 14 years after only …
Rio Grande at Alameda Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. We’ve had a burst of warm weather over the last two weeks, and you can see it in the river. Up at Alameda, it’s running at about 1,700 cubic feet per second (cfs) well above the average of 1,100 for this time of year. I realize for …
Folks in Tucson are gearing up for drought restrictions: A plan that would force homeowners and businesses to conserve water if southern Arizona’s drought worsens is expected to go into effect Tuesday. The City Council approved the plan in November, but the panel is scheduled to vote Tuesday on the code change that puts the …
A bunch of interesting drought news: From Australia, camels mad with thirst: “They helped to build the Australian nation and had a cross-continental railway named after their handlers. But now the camel population here is wreaking havoc in the desert and remote communities because of a desperate lack of water.” Things are so bad in …