Mapping Soil Moisture Anomalies

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NOAA soil moisture map

One useful measure of drought/pluvial conditions is soil moisture, which is critical both for non-irrigated farming and natural ecosystems. Today’s map is from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, which publishes a host of map products intended to illustrate what’s going on.

Note that the map I’ve chosen does not represent absolute soil moisture, which is available but is not terribly useful. Farms and ecosystems are adapted to “normal” conditions and the normal range of variability in their particular location, so what matters is not the absolute moisture but the extent to which current conditions depart from the norm.

Soil moisture corresponds with short-term conditions, and you can see a lot of similarity between the map above and the drought monitoring folks’ short term blend. Here in New Mexico, you can see the green splotches (color choice in the map is obvious and useful) indicating the relatively wet winter we’ve been having.
What soil moisture misses is the long term hydrologic conditions. That’s why the green splotches on New Mexico can be deceptive. While a great deal of our agriculture is dryland, soil moisture dependent, much of the ag in the central part of the state, along the Rio Grande, depends on snow-fed irrigation, and even multi-year snow pack conditions because of reservoir storage. That’s why conditions in New Mexico, while definitely improving, are not as good as it seems when I go out in the back yard and poke my finger into the dirt.

Another Hockey Stick

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We haven’t done hockey sticks here in a while, but there’s a paper in the new Journal of Climate worth noting in this regard:

High variability in reconstructions does not hamper the detection of greenhouse gas–induced climate change, since a substantial fraction of the variance in these reconstructions from the beginning of the analysis in the late thirteenth century to the end of the records can be attributed to external forcing. Results from a detection and attribution analysis show that greenhouse warming is detectable in all analyzed high-variance reconstructions (with the possible exception of one ending in 1925), and that about a third of the warming in the first half of the twentieth century can be attributed to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The estimated magnitude of the anthropogenic signal is consistent with most of the warming in the second half of the twentieth century being anthropogenic.

Detection of Human Influence on a New, Validated 1500-Year Temperature Reconstruction, Hegerl et al., Journal of Climate. Vol. 20, No. 4, February 2007, DOI: 10.1175/JCLI4011.1

More Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

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My first serious exposure to Roger Pielke Jr.’s work was at an American Meteorological Society meeting in Albuquerque in 2001. He gave a talk laying out the basic thrust of his hurricane vulnerability argument: that societal changes (essentially building stuff on the beach) are the dominant variable in the societal hurricane risk equation. It’s an argument he and Dan Sarewitz lay out here.

I’ve long thought the argument also applies to climate change and drought in the southwest. So I took advantage of their Nature paper to sketch out the issue in the weekend Albuquerque Journal:

New Mexico’s population is projected to increase 33 percent by 2030— an extra 650,000 people, all needing water to work and live.

In addition, scientists say that even if we slash greenhouse gas emissions now, Earth’s climate will keep changing for decades as it catches up to what we have already put into the air.

“No matter what greenhouse gas reduction policies the world agrees to, those policies will not have an effect on the climate for decades,” Pielke said.

That means residents of the West must focus as much on how we use our water as on what we put out our tailpipes, Pielke said in an interview.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

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On paleoclimate in caves:

In most parts of the world, New Mexico included, there have only been rain gauges and thermometers to record the weather for a little more than a century.

To figure out what happened before, scientists are exploiting a growing arsenal of tricks, from layers of ice in Antarctica to corals that grow differently depending on whether the water around them is warm or cold.

In New Mexico, tree rings have long been scientists’ tool of choice. But tree ring records here only go back 2,000 years. Asmerom has turned to cave formations to push the climate record back in time.

The idea is that changing rainfall patterns on the mountains above Pink Panther Cave are reflected in the growth patterns of the cave’s stalagmites. Asmeron and his colleagues painstakingly analyze the stalagmite’s layers in a University of New Mexico lab to tease out the story.

No Doubt a Coincidence

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Roger Pielke Jr. notes a remarkable coincidence between the text written by Bjorn Lomborg in the Guardian earlier this week and something Roger wrote last month. First Pielke:

Imagine, by contrast, if the Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, another organization with an agenda to be “policy neutral,” were reported in the media to say of the agency’s latest assessment on Iran, “I hope that the report will shock people, governments into taking more serious action.”

Now Lomborg:

Imagine if the director of the CIA published a new assessment of Iran, saying: “I hope this report will shock people, governments into taking more serious action.”

“Not a huge deal,” Roger writes, “and maybe just a simple coincidence.” I think he’s being generous.

Kids Today

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Much interesting discussion today about the issue of “framing” in the politics of global climate change – see, for example, Ellen Goodman’s column in the Boston Globe, along with useful discussion by Matthew Nisbet and Tom Yulsman. Useful stuff, but ignores the “sleeveless tops in February” frame. 🙂

From the Fix:

What’s with the weather lately? I mean, I know global warming is very bad because it melts the polar icecaps and will cause the demise of civilization, etc, but I can’t say I mind being able to wear sleeveless tops in February. Also, being able to feel my legs after I get back from going somewhere on the scooter is definitely a plus.

Fun With Science

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For the last six months or so, Journal photographer Marla Brose and I have been hanging out with University of New Mexico grad student Mel Strong, watching him do science:

To the lay outsider, science can look like an edifice of fixed knowledge— the facts in textbooks.

The day-to-day business of science is different, a tangle of unanswered questions. Where, for example, does New Mexico’s summer rain come from?

Much of the work done to answer those questions is carried out by an army of Mel Strongs— bright, energetic, young grad students, the grunts of science, dashing about on rooftops catching rain.

Marla’s photoshow

My story