Today’s word of the day: paleotempestology
Sunday Birdwatching
From Miguel, circa 2000
Nuclear Proliferation
There is much to recommend the nuclear proliferation piece in this morning’s New York Times by Bill Broad and David Sanger. It’s an excellent overview of the situation – how we got here and what can usefully be said about what happens next. I single out the following not because I think it’s the most important issue, but because it highlights a pet peeve of mine:
Democrats and Republicans spent the past week arguing over who lost control of North Korea, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. But seeds of the problem were planted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, just months after the armistice ended the fighting on the Korean Peninsula in 1953.
Can we please sidestep the partisan blame game frame? This is important stuff.
Daybook
paper of the day: When and where might climate change be detectable in UK river flows?: “Even where climate driven changes may already be underway, losses in deployable resources will have to be factored into long-term water plans long before they are statistically detectable. Rather than an excuse for inaction, such insights should inform more sophisticated approaches to environmental monitoring, climate change detection and adaptation.”
word of the day: disgregate – to scatter (hat tip Anu Garg)
music: Joshua Redman’s debut album, which I scored in the used music rack at Natural Sound. A bunch of loving renditions of great classics.
book: Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. I don’t actually have the book. I’ve just been poking around in it on Google books. Davis draws some threads between climate variability and political systems that seem very suggestive of some themes I’m interested in, especially with respect to the late 19th century drought that killed so many people in India.
Drought in Ethiopia
While we’re on the subject of drought, I stumbled on this, by Andrew Heavens, on Flickr. Heavens is a journalist in Ethiopia.
Climate Forecasts vs. Weather Forecasts
Andrew Dessler hauls out the old dice metaphor for a helpful discussion of why one might take long term climate forecasts seriously even if those silly meteorologists can’t get tomorrow’s weather forecast right:
One simple way to think about the difference in predicting weather and climate is to think about rolling a six-sided die. Predicting the weather is like predicting what the next roll will be. Predicting the cliamte is like predicting what the average and standard deviation of 1000 rolls will be. The ability to predict the statistics of the next 1000 rolls does not hinge on the ability to predict the next roll. Thus, one should not dismiss climate forecasts simply because weather forecasts are only good for a few days.
As a side note, it’s worth noting that the very fact that people notice and remember blown weather forecasts is evidence for how good the meteorological community has gotten. The reason we get annoyed and remember when they get it wrong is that we’ve come to rely on them because, in general, over a few days’ time window, they usually get it right.
Defining and Measuring Drought
Following on Daniel Collins’ discussion of the different measures and definitions of drought, here are a few useful web pages that pull together various indices.
One of the problems Daniel pointed out about my use of the Standardized Precipitation Index is that it only captures precipitation anomalies, which misses the temperature side of the equation. If it’s hotter than normal, you get more evapotranspiration, which makes drought conditions worse. SPI fails to capture that. The standard tool to get around that is the Palmer Drought Severity Index, which also considers temperature. The Palmer was developed in the 1960s as a tool to estimate soil moisture conditions using temperature and precipitation data. Its problem is that it’s such a scary black box that no one quite knows what’s going on inside it – what contributes to a particular Palmer number. It’s widely used, but you will find a lot of people in the drought community who are uncomforable with it. (In fact, that’s why SPI was developed.)
There’s a new tool that’s getting a lot of attention – the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model. It uses a much more realistic soil-weather-hydrologic system model. Dennis Lettenmaier’s group at the University of Washington is using it to produce regularly updated maps of soil moisture and other variables.
Then at Princeton, Lifeng Luo, who’s working with Lettenmaier, has a web page bringing together a whole bunch of different drought measures in one place. This may be the best approach of all. Given the slippery issue of defining drought, if you’re trying to pay attention to the issue, it’s probably best to look at many different indices and see what overall picture they are painting.
SST Anomalies
NASA has put up a nice sea surface temperature page, for tracking El Niño in the Pacific and hurricane conditions in the Atlantic. You can see the El Niño warming.
Phenology
Looks like the National Phenology Network is chugging forward:
Over the past two years, Julio Betancourt of the Desert Laboratory has been collaborating with Mark Schwartz of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a group of scientists from various disciplines, federal agencies, academic institutions, and environmental networks to develop a wall-to-wall, coast-to-coast phenology observation network for the U.S. By January 2007, an Executive Director and National Coordinating Office will be located at the University of Arizona’s Office of Arid Lands, with funding from USGS and the University. Plans are underway for the first set of observations to be made nationwide in growing season of 2007.
This is a very neat project. A more detailed writeup from EOS last year.
Drought and the Price of Wheat
Drought concerns (Australia, El Niño) continue to drive up the price of wheat:
Wheat prices rose to a 10-year high on concern that drought will reduce supply from Australia, the third-largest exporter of the grain.
Prices earlier soared by their daily limit for a second day and reached the highest since June, 1996, in Chicago. Australia’s wheat output may fall below the record low of 9.6 million tonnes in 2002, said AgRisk Management, a Sydney-based forecaster.
“The drought situation in Australia is getting worse and worse, so it’s quite possible we’ll get a record-low crop this year,” said Brett Stevenson, of AgRisk.
Raises again the interesting question Roger Pielke Jr. asked a couple of weeks back:
What has a bigger economic impact, ENSO or ENSO predictions?