Antarctic Snowmelt

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Antarctic satellite imageFrom NASA Goddard:

NASA researchers using data collected from 1987 to 2006 found snow melting in unlikely places in 2005: as far inland as 500 miles away from the Antarctic coast and as high as 1.2 miles above sea level in the Transantarctic Mountains. The 20-year data record was three times longer than previous studies and reaffirmed the extreme melting irregularity observed in 2005. During the same period, they also found that melting had increased on the Ross Ice Shelf, both in terms of the geographic area affected and the duration of increased melting across affected areas.

“Snow melting is very connected to surface temperature change, so it’s likely warmer temperatures are at the root of what we’ve observed in Antarctica,” said lead author Marco Tedesco, a research scientist at the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology cooperatively managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, Baltimore. The study will be published on Sept. 22 in the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters.

More Bad News From Down Under

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The drought thing’s back in the news:

Scarce winter rain across much of drought-parched Australia led a key government forecaster Tuesday to slash its harvest predictions for wheat and barley.

The wheat harvest, one of Australia’s major agricultural exports, was estimated at 15.5 million metric tons (17 million U.S. tons), down 31 percent from the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics’ last forecast in June.

Wet Water vs. Paper Water

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Staci Matlock at the Santa Fe New Mexican wrote a good primer over the weekend about the difference between water rights and actual water here in New Mexico:

Real water: That’s wet water, the stuff one needs for drinking, washing clothes, growing food, building houses and cooling power plants.

Paper water: The piece of paper that says how much real water someone has the legal right to use.

The problem: New Mexico has more paper water than real water.

Communicating Science

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Matthew Nisbet nails the New York Times’ hanging curve ball in his analysis of the problems of the collision between science and journalism, quoting Andrew Revkin’s fabulous line about “the tyranny of the news peg.” The context is a piece by the always provocative Gary Taubes about the problems of epidemiological research.

I’ve given a talk several times of late to scientists (I’ll be giving it up in Los Alamos in October – more on that later) where I try to highlight the difference between the public understanding of science – a fixed body of textbook knowledge – versus the murky way it happens out at the edge where scientists are actually learning new things. I view this misunderstanding as fundamental to a lot that goes on in the collision between science and politics. The latest frewfraw over the GISS temperature record is a classic example – a minor refinement that scientists view as part of the normal course of events. To those with the textbook model in mind, it suggests that science must have gotten it wrong. “But I thought last week they told me coffee was good for me!”

Revkin’s “tyranny of the news peg” suggests that journalists take the latest new bit of knowledge in a study published today in Science and treat it as a new fixed milepost ready for inclusion in the next edition of the textbooks, rather than a vague signpost pointing in an uncertain direction. Contingency is lost. To quote Nisbet:

One reason health studies might appear so confusing is because of what fellow NY Times reporter Andrew Revkin describes as the “tyranny of the news peg.”

As Revkin details in his excellent chapter at the Field Guide for Science Writers, one problem in the communication of uncertain science is that university research officers and journalists overwhelmingly define what’s news in science as the release of a new scientific study. Everyone benefits from this negotiation of newsworthiness, as universities compete for prestige and future funding dollars while journalists file dramatic narratives on deadline and with easier effort than required in a more thematic backgrounder.

Water in the Desert: Arizona Road Trip Edition

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Ocotillo

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

Lissa and I just back from a lovely weeks’ trip around Arizona. The main purpose was a visit to the University of Arizona and environs in Tucson for a project we’re working on. We spent a delightful day at the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research, made a pilgrimage to Tumamoc Hill to learn about packrat middens, and I got my first real taste from Julie Cole of how corals are used in paleoclimate reconstructions. As always, a huge thanks to all the scientists who are always so generous with their time and energy helping me understand what they do.

We had some play time, too, wandering through Saguaro National Park. I love desert ecosystems deeply, but probably the most fun for me of the entire trip was vicarious – watching Lissa have absolutely batshit crazy fun taking cactus pictures.

Some water stuff, too. I don’t know the Arizona water story very well, but found Phoenix absolutely fascinating. It’s a city that really didn’t take off until the invention of air conditioning in the 1950s, but it has taken off now in a really big way. My favorite water stop was the little Park of the Canals in Mesa (sorry, can’t find a good web page describing it). It preserves old canals dug by the Hohokam, who lived there before the Europeans arrived. Then in the late 1870s, Mormon settlers dug a lateral off of the Salt River and ran water seemingly uphill onto the mesa (hence the town’s name), digging out and reusing old Hohokam canals.

Mesa claims to be the largest suburb in the United States, and I believe it. But up on the north end of town, in a lowland along the dry riverbed of the Salt, we still find old citrus groves irrigated by lateral ditches taking water from the giant concrete lined canals built by the 20th-century descendents of the Hohokam and the Mormons. Like a throwback to my Southern California youth.

“permanent drought”

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What happens when what used to be abnormally dry becomes the new normal?

Drought will become a redundant term as Australia plans for a permanently drier future, according to the nation’s urban water industries chief.

And climate experts yesterday predicted the present drought would continue, signalling a cruel summer for farmers and sparking fears of higher food prices.

“The urban water industry has decided the inflows of the past will never return,” Water Services Association of Australia executive director Ross Young said. “We are trying to avoid the term ‘drought’ and saying this is the new reality.”