Death Valley averages about two inches (50 mm) of rain a year, but it’s been on the dry side there in 2007, making what happened there this week all the more remarkable:
Prior to today the yearly rainfall total in Death Valley was 0.10 of an inch. As of 2 p.m. PT, Death Valley had picked up 0.15 of an inch of rain today.
By the time it was done, according to this week’s drought monitor, the Sept. 22 storm had dropped 0.63 inch (16.5 mm), its biggest rain storm in two years.
Robert Krier has a fascinating piece in this morning’s San Diego Union Tribune suggesting a linkage between arctic melting and drought in the Southwest:
Three years ago, computer forecast models predicted that in 2050, the reduced ice mass would cause climate shifts that would result in a drought in the western United States.
But the ice is melting far faster than climatologists thought it would.
So much ice has disappeared that the Arctic today looks much like what scientists thought it would in 2050. It’s as if the atmosphere hit the fast-forward button.
The predicted climate changes also may have arrived, with much of the West in the midst of the kind of severe drought that geoscientist Jacob Sewall had envisioned for 2050.
The sort of dry spell they’re having in Southern California focuses the mind marvelously. I haven’t gone back and read the Sewall paper (if anyone has, I’d love to hear their thoughts), but this looks like a fascinating line of inquiry. I’ll keep you posted.
I’ve been incredibly busy lately, with a couple of fun but time-consuming outside projects going on, so I secretly harbored a fantasy this year: that the New York Yankees (my chosen baseball organization) would not make the playoffs.
That likely labels me as not a true fan. Maybe that’s so. Being a Yankee fan takes no particular effort, as they have been a winning, post-season sort of baseball team for a very long time. No great patience or suffering is required to be a Yankee fan. It’s not something earned, at least for me. But come post season, there are games on television to be watched, and more rigorous attention is required. And time. Time I do not really have right now. So it was my hope….
But the Yankees clinched a playoff spot this evening, did the champagne thing, and there soon will be post season baseball to be attended to. I am resigned to my fate.
From AFP:
Prime Minister John Howard warned against linking Australia’s worst drought on record to doomsday forecasts about climate change Wednesday, saying “a sense of proportion” was needed.
New NASA data in Eos today shows remarkable melting in Greenland:
A new NASA-supported study reports that 2007 marked an overall rise in the melting trend over the entire Greenland ice sheet and, remarkably, melting in high-altitude areas was greater than ever at 150 percent more than average. In fact, the amount of snow that has melted this year over Greenland could cover the surface size of the U.S. more than twice.
Today’s paper of the day is Regional climate change over eastern Amazonia caused by pasture and soybean cropland expansion:
Field observations and numerical studies revealed that large scale deforestation in Amazonia could alter the regional climate significantly, projecting a warmer and somewhat drier post-deforestation climate.
, C. Nobre, M. H. Costa, P. Satyamurty, B. S. Soares-Filho, and M. Cardoso (2007), Regional climate change over eastern Amazonia caused by pasture and soybean cropland expansion, Geophys. Res. Lett., 34, L17709, doi:10.1029/2007GL030612.
Looking south down the Rio Grande from the Paseo del Norte Bridge in Albuquerque Sunday, Sept. 23, 2007.
That’s maybe 450 cubic feet per second of flow, which is getting down toward what they call “base flow“. That’s the minimum flow in a desert river, the point at which you’re really just seeing the water table moving downstream rather than runoff. Not sure how close we actually are to it here, because they still seem to be letting water through the dams upstream, but we can’t be far above base flow right now. The river rarely gets lower than this.
It’s that autumn moment when we’re gathering and taking stock. The irrigation season is all but done, there’s no new water coming into the system and not much going out. The plants aren’t quite shut down, but evapotranspiration is on the wane, and the first yellow-brown leaves are showing on the cottonwoods. If we could see inside the trees, we’d no doubt find the soft light colored wood slowing as they prepare to put on the hard dark thin ring of winter. There’s no snow on the mountains yet, but soon we’ll be looking north and monitoring the growing snowpack and starting to wonder about next year. A sort of climatological, ecological, sociological pivot point in a place where things revolve around the water.
From our trip to the New Mexico State Fair a week ago. It’s a scale model of Hoover Dam, the great monument to America’s confidence in its ability to tame the great Colorado River and make the desert bloom. I’ve always loved the triumphant architecture of Hoover Dam, along with its downstream sibling, Parker Dam. Those were the days when we Americans could do stuff. The doing and the stuff are both too complicated to be summed up in a simple icon. In fact, like many icons, the triumphant architecture misleads, because the big dams aren’t as simple as all that, as we’re still coming to understand. But the model eschewed such political and moral complexity. It honors men building big stuff, and I liked it.
Wandering on the bike today, I stumbled (rolled?) into this lovely little new park in the Sawmill neighborhood, just north of Albuquerque’s Old Town.
