Via Strange Maps
Water in the Desert: Embudo Edition
Driving up to Taos last weekend to see art, Lissa and I stopped at Embudo in the Rio Grande Gorge to see the oldest continuously operated stream gage in the United States. The river was running about 450 cfs while we were there – not a lot of water, but higher than normal for this time of year.
It’s a great bit of Western water history. It was established in 1889, three years after a devastating drought had the effect of quite focusing the minds of those who had thought rain really did follow the plow and we could build farms out beyond the 100th meridian with reckless abandon.
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Dry Down the River
This week’s drought tour of America takes us to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where they just completed the driest August on record. It is an old river town, with its downtown opening onto a bend in the Mississippi River. For those interested in Western lore, it’s where John Wesley Powell spent a summer early in his military career, preparing the plans to defend the vital high ground above the river. I married into an old Cape Girardeau family, so I’ve always been interested in the place. Farms spread back up from the river, but they’re not doing so well right now:
For nonirrigated land, “it’s really been a pretty devastating summer,” said Brad Rippey, a meteorologist with the USDA.
Any rainfall at this point would be too late for the summer crops, Rippey said.
Water in the San Luis Valley
Staci Matlock has a nice story in the New Mexican about water problems in the San Luis Valley, on the upper Rio Grande in Colorado:
Until five years ago, most people thought water in the upper one-third of the San Luis Valley was hydrologically disconnected from the river. It was called a closed basin — no surface or groundwater flowed to the Rio Grande. Farmers and ranchers pumped away while fighting off recent attempts by wealthy investors to sell millions of gallons of water from the valley across the mountains to Denver and downstream to Santa Fe and Albuquerque.
Then came the crushing drought of 2002, Whitten said. Water began flowing from the Rio Grande backward, into the underground aquifer, and river flows decreased. In the basin, surface water from streams and creeks dried up as producers kept pumping. “North of the river, it became a losing system, and the aquifer declined,” said Whitten, a board member of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
We live in the fastest growing part of the country. It is also the driest. We don’t seem to be doing a very good job of linking those two issues, according to experts gathered for a two-day symposium on water and growth.
“We don’t adequately combine planning for growth and planning for water,” said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, Calif.
“The people responsible for making the decisions about building new homes are typically not the people who make decisions about water,” Gleick said.
Thinking About Future Climate
This paper by Martin Beniston on recent temperature extremes is a great example of the sort of exercise we need at the regional scale to help societies think about climate change. Switzerland has been hotter than Hades lately (bonkers 2003, record July 2006, near record winter 2006-07). Attribution is tricky, but Beniston neatly sidesteps the attribution problem and looks merely at how Switzerland’s recent experience fits into what the models say. The result is that the sort of temperatures they’ve been experiencing are the sort of temperatures suggested by the models under greenhouse warming. So, whatever the cause, we can learn from them:
By analyzing the impacts that these extreme conditions currently impose on environmental (e.g., the cryosphere, hydrological systems, and the biosphere) and socio-economic systems (e.g., human health, agriculture, hydropower), analogies with the future can be drawn for timely decision-making in terms of risk-reduction and adaptation strategies.
August Rainfall
Just totaling up my rainfall to send in to the National Weather Service: 1.4 inches (35.5 mm) in August. The official Albuquerque total, out at the airport, was 1.05 inches (26.7 mm). Around town, from the COCORAHS network, totals ranged from a low of 0.54 inch (13.7 mm) out on the southwest mesa to a high of 2.59 inches (65.8 mm) up in the foothills.
Last night, we got another 1.2 inches (30.5 mm) in one spectacular cloudburst. And I’ve got my eye on Henrietta, hoping for more later in the week.
Ed McGaffigan
Ed McGaffigan, former aide to Sen. Jeff Bingaman, long-serving member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the guy whose endless patience helped me understand, deeply, how government really works, died today.
I will repeat what I wrote in January, when it was clear that Ed was dying:
Reporters depend on the generosity of smart people, people who understand how things work and are willing to spend the time to help us understand it too. In my two decades as a reporter, I can think of only a handful of people as smart, generous and important to my work as Ed.
Urban Heat Islands
Let’s play the urban heat island game, shall we?
This is not about whether global warming is real or not. I’m prepared to stipulate that the various groups analyzing global temperatures are doing a fine job of correcting for the UHI in their global temperature trend calculations. This is about the way we’re creating cities that are becoming less livable, on account of how warm it stays in the summer.
Today’s poster child is Phoenix, Ariz. I was in Tucson last week. It seemed to me to be unbearably hot at night there. But a bunch of people at the meeting I was attending, down from Phoenix, seemed positively giddy to be out of the heat.
In August 2007, Phoenix set a record. The average overnight low for the month was 86 F (30 C). The continuous record at the Phoenix airport goes back to 1948. The average August overnight low over that time period is 79.5 F (26.4 C). The last time August fell below that mark was 1990. That’s some serious concrete-fueled, heat-island temperature trapping trend goin’ on out there where they stuck that thermometer.