Public goods, as my economist friends like to point out, are under provided. Today’s example from the federal wrecking ball is National Weather Service radiosonde launches. Here’s Daniel Cusick at E&E (the key bits aren’t behind their paywall): NOAA is “temporarily reducing” weather balloon flights from six National Weather Service offices in the Great Lakes …
Continue reading ‘Wrecking ball report: Weather balloon launches’ »
The members of the Cattle and Horse Protective association of New Mexico, composed of men who are naturally deeply interested in a copious rainfall, believe that the Salton sea has given New Mexico a better climate. At any rate they want the matter investigated before Uncle Sam dykes up the Colorado river permanently. – Albuquerque …
Continue reading ‘When they thought the Salton Sea would bring New Mexico rain’ »
I’ll be I’ll be yammering about the Colorado River basin, sneaky droughts, and megadroughts with the folks at NIDIS (the National Integrated Drought Information System): As the Colorado River Basin experiences 2020’s “sneaky drought” amid a long term pattern that looks increasingly like one of the region’s millennial “megadroughts” that last decades, water managers are …
Ben Cook, Justin Mankis, and Kevin Anchukaitis have an extremely helpful review paper in Current Climate Change Reports (ungated, thanks) sorting out what we do and don’t know about the impact of climate change on droughts. The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report was cautious in its assessment of our knowledge of drought, reporting only “low confidence” …
Continue reading ‘Drought, climate change – we know more than we used to’ »
Tom Philp had a great piece in Water Deeply last week about the language we use: Water policy becoming a prisoner of its own limited vocabulary, particularly when it comes to the weather. Here is a case that “drought” and “normal” belong in the dustbin of history, for their overuse can lead to the wrong conversation. …
Continue reading ‘“drought” – Philp on weather, water, and yesteryear’s language’ »
It finally rained yesterday morning in Albuquerque, a bit after 8 a.m., ending a 96-day dry streak. The water in the bottom of my gauge looked like strong tea as the rain washed out three months’ dust, and the relief was not measurable, but large. I ended up with 0.09 inch (2.3 mm) at my …
As I mentioned, this is the driest start to a water year in a century in Albuquerque. The preliminary Jan. 1 runoff forecast from the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service bears this out. The forecast, based on snow measurements, is stark. NRCS has 40 years of snow records, and for many sites, this is the …
The last time we had any measurable precipitation at Albuquerque’s airport weather station, where we keep the records, was Oct. 4. That’s 90 days, the driest start to a water year since 1917-18.
Putting together a lecture for tomorrow for UNM Water Resources Program students on “drought” – how we define, measure, and think about it – I noticed that Donald Trump, during a visit to North Dakota, seems to have brought up the issue, to wit: Trump on North Dakota’s drought: “It’ll disappear, it’ll all go away.” …
Just 5 percent of New Mexico ranked this week as “abnormally dry” in the federal Drought Monitor. That is the least dry the state has been since the monitor began publishing its weekly drought condition reports in January 2000.