Inkstain’s staff empiricist forgot the salient detail: 0.13 inch of rain in the Inkstain rain gauge. For a normal March, we’d get one storm that size per week.
Also, a correction. This wasn’t the first measurable rain since January. March 1 we got 0.01 at the airport.
Lissa and I had planned to go to Santa Fe yesterday to see art, but we didn’t really want to drive in snow, so we stuck around town and went to Explora instead.
The museum’s a hoot in a couple of ways. First of all, they’ve got a lot of sciency exhibits that allow you to play with the concepts involved: build dams to see divert water hither and yon, bend lasers in a plexiglass tube, watch light bend through a stream of flowing water. The aesthetics of manipulation are a delight. But what’s even more fun is watching other people (kids and adults) play. I probably spent half my time playing myself, and the other half watching other people play in ways I never would have thought of.
The most fun: standing on the stairway looking down on the first floor and watching the little kids figure out how a column of rising air can support a floating beach ball. Or a smaller floating basketball. Or both balls at the same time!
No question mark. We awoke to snow this morning. Our camera’s busted, so I refer you to Coco for a look. The staff empricist empiricist here at Inkstain reports 1-3/4 inch on the various flat bits in the backyard. The water equivalent at the airport is a tenth of an inch. Those of you living in more arduous climates will no doubt scoff at a storm of this magnitude qualifying as “storm of the winter,” but we’ll take it. It’s the first measurable precipitation here since Jan. 25.
Most importantly, according to the Snotel stations, we had up to an inch of snow water equivalent. Snow water equivalent is the water there is when the show’s melted, which is what matters for water supplies. Actual snow depth was more than 7 inches at Chamita and more than a foot of snow at the Grayback station in southern Colorado.
One of my weather geeks called the weather settling in over northern New Mexico and southern Colorado today the “storm of the winter”, which is not saying much given the winter we’ve had, but is still better than saying nothing. There’s currently an avalanche warning for the San Juans in southern Colorado, with two feet of snow expected. Winter storm watches and warnings all over the state, with the added strange weirdness of a red flag warning (high fire danger) across the eastern part of the state.
In Albuquerque, one to three inches are possible in the foothills by tomorrow. Yippee.
A nice review of Al Zelicoff and Michael Bellomo’s Microbe:
Microbe is also a book designed to disrupt our sense of complacency about the public health system in the U.S. It challenges our assumption that the public health system works well, even in the face of widespread disease and even epidemics. The reader encounters example after example of past system failures under even modest stress. A long litany of probable future outbreaks and bioterror events is presented, in a factual and straightforward manner. Having made the case for the need for systematic improvements, the authors propose some practical ways to make those improvements.
Local Albuquerque authors and, full disclosure, Al’s one of those generous sciency people who helps me understand the complicated stuff.
An exciting press release arrived at the office today about a subject I’d not been familiar with: the Expanding Earth (EE) hypothesis. Its chief proponent, or at least its most visible, seems to be comic book artist Neal Adams:
THEY, the scientists of Earth have not faced the simple fact that the Earth is growing!…that will all change, now…!
In order to hide the terrible truth (terrible???) that the Earth is growing, “the scientific community” insisted on the concept of “subduction” and has for over 30 years. A concept that is totally untrue and unscientific and well, stupid!
I know what you’re saying. This is crazy, flying in the face of a broad scientific consensus. Just remember the words of Michael Crichton:
The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
Kevin’s mock interview with Hank Aaron:
AARON: We could also do a multiple linear regression with all the other season-by-season records of all the pre-roids sluggers. Anyway, which ever technique is most appropriate, we extrapolate from ’98 to the ’06 season to get his expected totals. Then let’s see if his post-1998 totals match. Clearly 2001 (73 HRs) was an outlier, but ’02 – ’04 are probably high, too. So we adjust those high totals down to the expected line. The residual is wiped off his HOF record, he gets to keep any HRs that come in below or at the extrapolation curve.
music: Today’s podGoober Project Gem: “rock ‘n’ roll” tuba, from back in the days before Bruce bulked up. No doubt many “rock” songs over the years have featured a tuba, but Gary Tallent’s turn on the big brass in Wild Billy’s Circus Story is the only one that comes to mind.
film: Netflixed An American in Paris. A tackysweet love story that’s frankly a bit much, but watching Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron move together is a treat that more than makes up for it. Or just watching Gene Kelly move alone. And there is much Gershwin.
blogdish: Scot Key suitably mocks our Trader Joe’s obsession.
climate science: Virmani and Weisberg on The 2005 hurricane season: An echo of the past or a harbinger of the future?:
Recent Atlantic hurricane activity raises several questions. For example, why was the 2005 season so early and active and are there similarities with the past? We show that parallels exist between 2005 and previously active years. Tropical Atlantic sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies beginning in winter aided the formation of early storms. On longer timescales SST, sea level pressure and zonal winds exhibit multidecadal variability; weaker easterlies during the positive phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) result (via ocean-atmosphere interactions) in warmer water and increased hurricane activity. However, individual active years appear independent of the AMO phase.
blathering: If you’re in Albuquerque, you can come hear my take this evening on climate science, climate policy, climate politics and the role of the journalist: New Mexicans for Science and Reason monthly meeting, 7 p.m. room 2402 at the UNM Law School.
Welcome Daniella: Baby Daniella officially joined us Sunday, daughter to my friends Jaime and Heather. Among the activities of the day (I’m off work) none is more important than going over to meet Daniella.
From CBS news comes yet another explanation for the Loch Ness monster: frolicking circus elephants:
“The reason why we see elephants in Loch Ness,” asserts Dr. Neil Clark, a paleontologist, “is that circuses used to go along the road to Inverness and have a little rest at the side of the loch, and allow the animals to go and have a little swim around.”
The above-water parts of a swimming elephant, Palmer says, might look from a distance like Nessie’s most famous profile.
Hat tip Amanda (who really should blog).
On hurricanes and drought (sub. req.):
The same global forces that unleashed Katrina on New Orleans may be quietly sapping the West of its water.
Drought and hurricanes seem to go hand-in-hand, said Julio Betancourt, a drought researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey in Tucson.
Betancourt is among a growing number of researchers pointing to a warming Atlantic as the guilty party. Already implicated in a burst of increased hurricane activity since the mid-1990s, the Atlantic is now being fingered as a suspect in western droughts.
But while the dramatic arrival of a hurricane is hard to ignore, drought has a way of quietly creeping in, said University of New Mexico scientist Lou Scuderi.
“Droughts— they’re just sort of there,” Scuderi said. “They’re persistent.”
The most recent piece of evidence comes from a team of scientists studying repeated multiyear droughts in the upper Colorado River basin— water supply to much of the western United States.
When the Atlantic warms— as it began to do in the mid-1990s— the Colorado River tends to dwindle, said Denver-based U.S. Geological Survey climate researcher Gregory McCabe.