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 …
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 …