From the CLIMAS folks at the University of Arizona:

Drought – Moderate drought to abnormally dry conditions persist in southeastern and northeastern Arizona, and have expanded eastward to include most of New Mexico.

* Pasture and range land conditions continue to degrade in Arizona and improve slightly in New Mexico.

* Drought conditions are much improved from last year, but the large Colorado River reservoirs and Elephant Butte Reservoir in New Mexico remain below average.

Temperature – Since the start of the water year, and over the last 30 days, temperatures over most of the Southwest have been above average.

Precipitation – Since the start of the water year, most of the Southwest has been drier than average.

Climate Forecasts – Models indicate increased chances of above-average temperatures in the Southwest through May of 2006, but there are no forecasted precipitation anomalies for the region.

El Niño – ENSO-neutral conditions are most likely to exist during the next six to nine months.

The Bottom Line – Drought is likely to persist along some parts of the Arizona-New Mexico border. Hydrological drought continues to affect some large reservoir levels in the Southwest.

Check out especially the big reservoirs on the Colorado (Powell and Mead) which despite a wet 2004-05 are still well below average. New Mexico’s reservoirs also are in sorry shape despite coming off an unusually wet year. In other words, the big storage systems in the southwest are heading into the 2005-06 water year in pretty lousy shape.

Snowpack is currently lousy (the CLIMAS chart here is easy to read, more up-to-date stuff from the Western Regional Climate Center is here. Don’t sweat this yet. It’s quite early in the year for this measure – you can make this up in a hurry with one or two good dumps. Last weekend’s “storm” is not what I’m talking about. Chamita (my favorite SNOTEL site for no particular reason except that I love its name) got less than an inch of snow.

(You can watch snowpack in real time at the NRCS’s New Mexico SNOTEL page. Click on one of the attractive “pushpins” on the map for site data. I trust this more than the self-reported ski area numbers you often hear on the TV news or, ahem, read in the newspaper.)

I finally got around to reading the Pielke Sr. et al. paper on drought in Colorado in 2002 (paper here and Roger blogged it here).

The data’s Colorado-specific, but the New Mexico data doesn’t look that much different, and the message here is pretty much the same. What we viewed as an “exceptionally severe drought,” as measured against historical and paleo records, really wasn’t. It’s our water needs that have changed as population has exploded here in the intermountain west:

The sobering conclusion is that Colorado is more vulnerable to drought today than under similar precipitation deficits in the past.

Continue reading ‘On Drought’ »

More on global warming winners and losers:

For regions producing high-quality grapes at the margins of their climatic limits, these results suggest that future climate change will exceed a climatic threshold such that the ripening of balanced fruit required for existing varieties and wine styles will become progressively more difficult. In other regions, historical and predicted climate changes could push some regions into more optimal climatic regimes for the production of current varietals. In addition, the warmer conditions could lead to more poleward locations potentially becoming more conducive to grape growing and wine production.

A toast to the new Siberian varietals, coming to a wine shop near you.

This whole blog-to-blog comment conversation thing can get a bit maddening. What we really need is to all sit down in a room together. I think a lot of the misunderstandings that turn into arguments would instead play out as useful conversations. Plus we could drink beer*.

Today’s disjointed conversation has Mark Hadfield raising good questions in the comments here on Inkstain:

There’s no doubt that this metric (globally averaged surface temperature) doesn’t tell the whole story, but it’s quite another thing to suggest that it tells us nothing, or very little. Now I’m not suggesting that Roger (Senior) is suggesting such a thing, but the trouble is that on this issue, as on many others, I find it hard to work out what Roger *is* suggesting.

Over on his blog, Roger responds:

Here is what I am “suggesting”. For the assessment of global heat content changes (”global warming”) over the last 50 years, we focus on the assessment of ocean heat content changes, as the primary metric to assess the radiative imbalance of the climate system (http://blue.atmos.colostate.edu/publications/pdf/R-247.pdf). We avoid using the trends in the globally-averaged surface temperatures, since this diagnostic is fraught with a wide range of problems, including the most recent one that we identified in our GRL paper (http://blue.atmos.colostate.edu/publications/pdf/R-302.pdf). For earlier time periods, we have no choice but to use an estimate of global averaged temperature trends, but we need to recognize the very large uncertainty that exists with such a climate metric.

I don’t think globally averaged surface temperature tells us nothing. In fact, I think it answers a question the general public has, which is “how much warmer is it getting.” People live in air at the surface, so by “warmer,” it’s surface temperature they want to understand. That’s why I defended Juliet Eilperin last month against Roger’s criticism, and why I’ll probably do an end-of-the-year story for the paper that includes a discussion of the fact that 2005 is the warmest year ever. But I also am increasingly persuaded that an overemphasis on that one s

* I don’t really like beer. It’s metaphor.