How to measure snow (and buy my book!)

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measuring snow

measuring snow

We’ve not had much opportunity of late to measure snow here in Albuquerque, so I had to snag this picture from some time ago.

But it’s that time of year when thoughts of weather nerds turn to the snow in their backyards, which offers me another chance to flog my book, which would be a delightful gift if you’re trying to think of what to buy for that precocious child in your world who wants to learn how to think about weather, climate and science for herself.

One of the things we tried to do with the book was not only explain who paleoclimate, modern climate science and meteorology are done by the grownups, but to show how easy it is to do a lot of this sort of science for yourself, one backyard rain or snow measurement at a time.

Here are the basics for snow: Take a ruler outside. Look for places where the snow has fallen on a flat surface, like a picnic table or the top of your car. Stick the ruler down through the snow, and note the height of the top of the snow on the ruler. Take three measurements and average them.

I have learned in doing this myself over the years that I’m not very good at “eyeballing” it and guessing the depth, a reminder of the usefulness of measuring.

The book is The Tree Rings’ Tale: Understanding Our Changing Climate (Worlds of Wonder), published by the University of New Mexico press.

 

Nationalism on the Lower Colorado

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The All-American Canal, which grabs water from Imperial Dam and runs it along the north side of the California-Baja border before delivering it to Imperial Valley farmers, was built at some great expense to replace the original wandering route that took the water south into Mexico before curving back north to US farms. The folks behind the project pushed it because they tired of letting Mexican farmers have a cut of the water before it got to US lettuce crops.

But maybe it’s about more than an unwillingness to share? Maybe it’s who the sharing was with? From the LA Times last month, a fun piece by Tony Perry at the reaction to the fact that the new US-Mexico Colorado River water deal calls for some of Mexico’s share of the river’s water to be delivered by the canal with that very specific name:

The idea does not sit well with farmers and officials in the Imperial Valley who believe that powerful outsiders are again ignoring the valley’s hard-fought water rights, this time in an effort to improve relations with the Mexican government.

“There’s a reason it’s called the All-American Canal,” said Kevin Kelley, general manager of the Imperial Irrigation District, raising his voice for emphasis.

 

In Texas, water policy is a front burner political issue

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Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples is setting up a run for lieutenant governor. Making the rounds, he ended up this week in the dry parts of the state, where folks naturally asked him about water:

“When I talk to companies about them expanding in Texas or moving to Texas,” he said, “inevitably two questions come about: What’s Texas going to do about its water needs and what is Texas going to do to have a skilled and available work force?”

Pointing to area’s struggles with the Texas drought, Staples said the solution can’t just be to restrict usage.

“Last decade, we had 1,200 people a day move to Texas,” Staples said. “This decade, we’re going to have 1,500 people a day moving to Texas. Having an available water supply is critical to the future of our state’s economic growth. Having an available water supply means jobs.”

He cited a number of routes for improving water resources, including improved irrigation techniques, developing plants that are drought resistant as well as pest resistant and using low-cost natural gas or excess wind energy to fuel desalination plants to treat brackish water to make it usable.

My point in bringing this up is not to argue that there’s anything particularly special about Staples’ policy prescriptions. Rather, it’s the fact that a statewide Texas candidate making the rounds has a water schtick at all, that it’s on the agenda.

Possible San Juan-Chama water shortages

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Regular readers will know of my obsession with pushing beyond the “OMG we’re running out of water!” story line to look in detail at who, specifically, gets shorted when supplies run low and what adaptive responses they have available.

In New Mexico, water managers are using the occasion of our current drought to helpfully prepare a test case for me!

From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal:

The federal government has begun notifying Rio Grande water users that they may not get a full allotment of water from the San Juan-Chama project in 2013 after two years of deep drought sapped reserves.

San Juan-Chama water, imported through a tunnel beneath the Continental Divide, has been a lifeline for Rio Grande water users in recent drought years, especially Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District farmers and the Albuquerque metro area’s government water utility.

But two years of drought have drained the project’s water reserves, and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation managers have been informing water agencies that they could see a 20 percent curtailment in water deliveries next year.

 

So my dad died, and I wrote these things that are helping me feel a little better

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I sat for a really long time with my Dad Sunday afternoon. His labored breathing was like a metronome, a weird combination of great labor and steady rhythm. His eyes were vacantly half open, and it’s reasonable to assume (I did at the time) that he had no idea I was there. It was lunchtime, and I was headed to see my mom, only intending to stop in with dad for a moment, because the death bed vigil for a man no longer there seemed ridiculous. But I sat, for just a minute.

Every so often there would be a hitch in his breathing, and I would look up quickly, into his eyes, hoping it was the end. But then the metronome would resume.

Once I’d been there an hour, I couldn’t leave. It wasn’t a painful afternoon or a pleasant afternoon, it was simply time suspended, a day with me in my mind and Dad in his. But as the sun started to fade, I realized that if there was any light making through Dad’s sunken, half-opened eyes to the brain behind, it was likely the last fading sunlight my father would ever see.

Sharing that moment suddenly mattered to me a great deal. He was an artist. The light was the thing:

Malfunction has a way of clarifying function. As dementia etched away my father’s brain, he lost the ability to draw and paint. But from the window of the Albuquerque apartment where he and my mother have lived in recent years, he could look out at the Sandia-Manzano mountain chain and just watch that great big New Mexico sky. He didn’t know much, but in the moment, he always knew what the clouds were doing.

I’d take him for a drive, and we would stop for a short walk (it was all he could do) in the bosque. He would stare at the twisting forms of the old cottonwoods and talk about them, pointing and composing paintings in his mind.

The project now, beyond the relief of it being over, is to carve my way back through the last half dozen years of dementia and rebuild the memory of something else.

 

The shortcomings of the Colorado train wreck metaphor

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Hannah Holm of Colorado Mesa University had a good piece earlier this month in the Grand Junction Free Press outlining the future risks facing Colorado River water users and managers:

A heavy train is moving at 5 miles per hour toward… a cliff? A collision? And how far away might this unknown calamity be?

These were the images and questions I was left with at the Upper Colorado River Basin Water Conference hosted by the Water Center at Colorado Mesa University Nov. 8-9. I deeply appreciate the fact that our presenters used such colorful language!

The heavy train is our collective use of Colorado River water, and the calamity we are facing is our potential inability to balance supply and demand in an orderly way. According to a nearly complete study on Colorado River Basin water supply and demand coordinated by the US Bureau of Reclamation, we’ve passed the point where use of the basin’s water resources exceeds the quantity provided by Mother Nature. The fact that the train wreck isn’t here yet is because of big reservoirs that store water from year to year. Climate change shows no sign of helping: The mean of all the models used in the bureau study indicates higher variability from year to year and a decline in average natural flows at Lee Ferry of 9% by 2060.

Holm’s summary of the issues is spot on. But the train wreck/cliff metaphor seems wrong to me, in ways that I fear are skewing the basin water policy and politics discussion. The train wreck or cliff metaphor suggests that the problem manifests itself as an abrupt calamity – from her lumbering 5 miles per hour to full stop crash (or over the cliff). But the nature of the problem, and therefore the needed discussion about potential solutions, is not like that.

We will not go from full water supplies, which everyone largely receives now, to zero in an instant. We will go from full water supplies to less-than-full water supplies. The policy approach to avoiding a crash is different from the policy approach to preparing for the allocation of growing shortage/shrinking supply.

atmospheric river headed California way

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I love the way “atmospheric river” has now entered the public weather discussion lexicon:

Enjoy the dry, cool days that mark the start of this week in the Sacramento area. Then get ready for an “atmospheric river” late in the week that will bring perhaps 3 inches of rain to the Valley, the National Weather Service said Sunday.

ARs (they evening have an initialism!) are all the rage in weather and water management circles in the west these days. Some material from the Inkstain back catalog:

More on the definition of “drought”: a dry spot

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Another episode in my effort to explore the meaning of “drought” by way of example.

Tramway wetland, November 2012

Tramway wetland, November 2012

Up on Albuquerque’s north side is a spot the birders call the “Tramway wetland”*. It’s the spot where the main flood control channel for much of Albuquerque slows before entering the Rio Grande. The local flood control authority has designed a wide shallows to catch the water and allow grody gunk to settle out, to reduce the amount of urban runoff contamination entering the river. It usually smells bad and looks even worse, but the birds, especially migrating shorebirds, love it because it’s one of the few large areas of shallow water in a stretch of river that once would have had much shallow water, before humans used dams and levees to break it of its meandering ways.

More than once I have taken my sandwich and binoculars to the Tramway wetland, which is not far from my office, at lunch. Smell notwithstanding, the birding is great. I’ve seen 50 species there, and the eBird reports for the site list 191 species.

I was out on Friday looking for a rare dunlin that several birders had spotted, and was amazed at how little water there was in the wetland. Just a few pools in the deepest spots, far less than usual. There are two things likely going on here. The first is “drought” by the conventional definition: not a whole lot of rain. Since Sept. 1, we’ve had just 0.55 inches (1.4 cm) of rain at the rain gauge at the airport. Average for  this stretch is 2.58 inches (6.55 cm). So there’s less rain flowing down the flood control system and out into the wetland.

The second effect is distinctly anthropogenic.

In addition to rain, the flood control system gets some water when Albuquerque’s municipal water agency starts up one of its big groundwater pumps. They flush an initial pulse of water into the flood control system, which makes its way down to the wetland. Albuquerque has shifted some of its demand to surface water, using a dam along the Rio Grande to divert water for municipal use. This seems to mean less pump flushing, and therefore less “wasted” water flowing into the Tramway wetland.

Here, I think, there is drought.

There were still a dozen sandhill cranes, drought or not, poking around in the barely-wetland, plus a great blue heron, some odds and ends of ducks that I really felt sorry for poking around in the mudholes that are left. And maybe the dunlin. Couldn’t be sure as it took flight, so I didn’t add it to my life list.

* The bridge in the picture is actually Fourth Street NW, or maybe Second Street NW (a confusing intersection), which turns into Roy Road, which eventually turns into the road we call Tramway. Don’t ask me why it’s not therefore the “Fourth Street wetland”. I just do as I’m told.

the importance of music education

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Once, while a young teen, I spotted a house on fire while dad was driving me home from my bassoon lesson. I alerted the residents, who were unaware that their roof had caught fire. It was a relatively modest fire, and firefighters were able to quickly extinguish it without major damage to the house or injury to those inside.

I consider this a good example of the importance of music education.

 

Where does this fit into our definition of “drought”?

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This is August 2012 along the Duranes ditch in Albuquerque’s north valley. The ditch on the left is relatively new. The spur to the right, obscured by the sunflowers, has been in continuous use for more than 300 years. The previous 24 months for this climate division had been the second driest such stretch on record, going back to the 1890s. Yet water management decisions – storage of waster upstream for release during the depth of summer, importation of water via the San Juan-Chama Project from the Colorado River Basin, a distributary network that fans the river out across the Rio Grande Valley floor – made this spot cool and lush in the heat of a droughty summer.

What does this contribute to our understanding of “drought”?

Duranes Ditch, August 2012

Duranes Ditch, August 2012