Some time ago I purchased an Actron CP7875 PocketTherm Infrared Thermometer
The accompanying description describes it as “the most basic tool for any ghost hunter.” I cannot attest to its usefulness.
Stephen B. Davis Jr., Back From the Dead?
There’s some water geek hilarity over on the New Mexico Independent today correcting V.B. Price on a point of history and water law.
First Price:
New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming — the “upper basin” states in the Colorado Compact of 1922 — have “junior” water rights to California, Arizona, and Nevada, the states that comprise the “lower basin.” And that means in a crisis, upper basin states won’t get their water until lower basin states have their’s.
Not exactly, says a commenter who identifies himself as “Steve Davis”.
Do you honestly think I’d negotiate a compact that made New Mexico a “junior” water user? That was exactly the situation we were in before the compact was in place! We were going to be “junior” because California was going to develop faster than us and therefore be more senior. We negotiated the compact to PROTECT us from the situation you describe in your article. We get to use our water “in perpetuity” subject only to our obligation not to deplete the flow of the river below 75 million acre-feet over a ten year period at Lee Ferry (we’ve never violated this obligation). California is “senior” only to Arizona and Nevada by virtue of the Colorado River Basin Project Act (1968) but I’m not posting from the dead to give you a history lesson. I suggest you go back and read the compact (it’s not that long) and try to avoid trampling your forefathers next time you want to spice up a water story.
Stephen B. Davis Jr. was a New Mexico Supreme Court justice who represented the state in 1922 on the commission that negotiated the Compact. Davis was, in the words of New Mexico water historian Ira Clark, “a recognized authority on water law.” He seems to be squirming in his grave.
Colorado Compact Commission
I think that’s “Steve,” second from the right. Who am I to question him on this? He is, after all, “a recognized authority on water law.”
If Stationarity Dies, How Will We Know?
When Milly et al. pronounced the death of stationarity in Science magazine last year, lots of folks in the water world took notice. Stationarity is the idea that the envelope of variability we’ve seen is the envelope of variability we’ll get in the future. Not so in a climatically changing world?
Now come Gabriele Villarini and colleagues with an elaborate set of statistical tests poking at peak flow in 50 rivers and saying, in essence, if stationarity is dead they can’t seem to find a corpse:
Despite the profound changes that have occurred to drainage basins throughout the continental United States and the recognition that elements of the hydrologic cycle are being altered by human-induced climate change, it is easier to proclaim the demise of stationarity of flood peaks than to prove it through analyses of annual flood peak data.
Since I don’t begin to understand the technical details of their analysis, I’ll ask the wonks in the audience: Is stationarity back alive?
Thinking About Aridity
Here’s a nice way of thinking about aridity:
If all the water that flows in each river during an average year were spread evenly over the area drained by the river, the depths would be: Delaware 20.9 in.; Columbia 13.1 in.; Mississippi 6.7 in.; Colorado 1.15 in.
Source: Water and Choice in the Colorado Basin, National Research Council, 1968
The Colorado, Then and Now
I’m reading Frank Waters’ The Colorado
Colorado River at its confluence with the Little Colorado
When the Colorado River Compact was being negotiated in 1922, the remarkable Delph Carpenter, Colorado’s representative on the seven-state negotiating body, knew that the upper basin states were going to grow much more slowly than the lower basin states, but that they would eventually need the water. But I’m not sure what Carpenter thought that meant. The development of the Colorado’s water at the time was primarily for agriculture. That is what “reclamation” meant, right – making the desert bloom? Who, if anyone, saw the rise of Phoenix or Las Vegas, and when?
(Image courtesy Glen Canyon Adaptive Management Program)
Westward Ho!
From today’s bike ride, the Westward Ho motel along old Route 66 on Albuquerque’s west side. I love the saguaro and battered neon. I’m guessing the pun in the motel’s name is not intentional.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: It’s All About the Evaporation
In thinking about the effects of climate change on our arid landscape, it’s easy to get distracted by precipitation numbers. Will it go up or down? How much? What’s the error bar look like? But in recent years, the research community that looks at the Southwestern U.S. has been banging away on “P minus E”. It’s not just the precipitation. It’s precipitation minus evaporation. Or, to be a bit more specific when looking at riparian systems in arid landscapes, evaporation (open water) and transpiration (the plants that live on a river’s groundwater).
Water in the Rio Grande Bosque
In this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, I have a story (ad/sub req.) looking at this point through the latest research to tackle the question, by UNM climate scientist David Gutzler and research student Tessia Robbins. Journal photographer Greg Sorber and I went out to a stretch of bosque (the woods along the Rio Grande) to a site where scientists measure evapotranspiration:
In the summer, this stretch of bosque can lose the equivalent of a layer of water a quarter of an inch deep every day — far more than falls from the sky. The warmer it gets, the more this landscape dries out.
It is not the rain and snow that matters most, scientists like Cleverly say. It is the evaporation.
As Earth’s climate warms, scientists expect years-long dry spells and wet spells to continue, just as we have seen in the past.
But with warmer temperatures and the resulting increase in evaporation, it will be harder to recover from the dry spells, according to a new analysis by University of New Mexico professor David Gutzler and UNM research student Tessia Robbins.
“We’ll go into a big drought some time in the 21st century,” Gutzler said, “and we just may not pull out of it.”
Texas Drought
I’m in the midst of a story for the newspaper about drought and climate change that looks at the importance of temperature. It is not simply whether more or less rain falls, but also how much evaporation there is. This is the critical message from Richard Seager’s 2007 paper about the permanent Dust Bowl.
Texas conditions from Drought Monitor
That is also the message from this week’s discussion of current conditions in Texas from the Drought Monitor:
Historic drought continued to grip southern Texas, where San Antonio closed in on its driest two-year period on record. From August 1954 – September 1956, San Antonio—entrenched in an area of exceptional drought (D4)—received precipitation totaling 30.23 inches. During the current drought, only 24.78 inches (38 percent of normal) fell from September 1, 2007 – August 25, 2009. In other words, San Antonio would need 5.45 inches of rain during the last six days of August to prevent a record-low, two-year total. In addition, San Antonio’s tally of 100-degree days continued to climb. San Antonio’s former 1998 annual record of 36 days with triple-digit heat was broken long ago; through August 25, there have been 56 days with highs of 100 degrees F or greater. Elsewhere in southern Texas, locations such as Corpus Christi and Victoria endured a 79th consecutive day (June 8 – August 25) with above-normal temperatures.
8-?-2
Don DeLillo has a great line in “Underwold” describing how, at a night baseball game, under the lights, “the players seem completely separate from the night around them.”
Something in excess of a quarter of a century ago, Lissa and I went to baseball games while we were falling in love, and we’ve been going ever since. It’s an odd thing, because neither of us are huge sports fans. We just love going to ballgames together.
We lived in South Pasadena, which is just up the freeway from Dodger Stadium, and Lissa had this great secret parking space that I won’t tell you about, because we might go back. I thought she was so cool, because she had a secret Dodger Stadium parking space. We’d go early enough to park there for free, because we didn’t have a lot of money, and we’d walk in and sit in the way upper deck behind home plate, the red seats, and scarf hot dogs for dinner. Or we’d sit in the better seats when I had a crack at the free tickets I sometimes got at work.
When we were moving to Albuquerque, we left Nora (she was two) with Lissa’s sister Ginnie and flew in for a weekend to find an apartment. We’d nailed it down by Saturday night, so Sunday afternoon we went out to Duke stadium to catch a ballgame. If you’ve never seen baseball in Albuquerque, you’re missing one of the sport’s great treats. The stadium faces the Sandia Mountains, and you can watch baseball or just sit and gaze quietly into the desert. Back then, the Dukes were the Dodgers’ farm team, so there was a sweet transition in our baseball life.
We end up at the ballpark all the time these days, not because we’re huge fans of what are now known as the Albuquerque Isotopes, but because we love the idle pace of a night watching those players, separate from the night around them. The ‘Topes, our team today, is the Dodger farm team again, so a certain symmetry has been restored.
Minor league baseball is different from major league ball, but it has a joy all its own. The players are often very good, but sometimes not quite. There’s a quirky unpredictability about it.
Saturday night we watched the ‘Topes play the Nashville Sounds. In the fourth, the ‘Topes’ first two hitters, second baseman Luis Maza and third baseman Hector Luna, both singled. Left fielder Dee Brown came to the plate with runners on first and second and hit a long drive to deep center field.
Standing at second, Maza froze, waiting to make sure the center fielder would not catch the ball. Luna, a base behind him, had no such caution, and broke immediately, so that by the time the ball fell safely just beyond the Nashville center fielder’s grasp, Luna had caught up to the runner ahead of him, and the two-person train took off, Luna rounding third base just a couple of strides behind Maza.
It was one of those baseball plays that seems to play out in slow motion, where you’re not quite sure where to look – Maza and Luna barreling for home, the throw coming in to the relay man (The shortstop? I’m still not sure.) who turns and fires to home.
The throw beat the two runners by a good ten feet, so you’ve got what I can only assume was a bemused Nashville catcher standing there while not one but two baserunners bore down on him. All he had to do was hang onto to the ball, apply tag one and tag two, which he did. The strangest double play I’ve ever seen in my many years of watching baseball.
I’m not sure how to properly score it, but I’ve got an “8-?-2” for both Maza and Luna on my score sheet. It was, for sure, one of the most entertaining plays I’ve ever seen, but I probably say that every time we go out to the ballpark.
I was Twittering later with fellow scribe Steve Terrell, who it turns out was also at the game, about the play.
Me: “It’s the charm of Triple A ball. Some great baseball, plus endless surprise.”
Said Terrell: “AAA ball is the punk rock of baseball.”
We sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and do the YMCA dance with the Village People (“the Gay Song“!). We cheer the latest addition to AAA schtick, a little girl named Sophie who sweeps off the bases once a night between innings and swats the home plate umpire on the butt with her broom while Cyndi Lauper sings “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” over the PA. It was a hit in 1983, the year Lissa and I fell in love.
Charismatic Megafauna
I’m sure there are a lot of things suffering right now because of the Texas drought. Few are as charismatic, though (sorry Michael), as the whooping crane:
A drought in Texas severely affected the whooping crane’s foods of blue crabs and berries. Corn feeders were set up to supplement the cranes’ diets, but only about half of them used the feeders. And wetlands and prairie have been making way for cornfields along parts of the flock’s flyway, which runs from northern Canada through Montana and the Dakotas, New Mexico, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Kansas.
(Image courtesy National Biological Information Infrastructure)