Because it’s hard to resist the word “megadrought” – or, frankly, the concept: Tree rings from the headwaters of the Rio Grande show a 50-year drought from 122 to 172 AD, suggesting that “megadroughts” may be a recurring feature of the region’s climate, according to new research by a University of Arizona team. Scientists have …
I had occasion this evening to revisit “Sensitivity of Streamflow in the Colorado Basin to Climatic Changes,” by Linda Nash and Peter Gleick, circa 1991: Water availability, quality, and demand may be affected by higher temperatures, new precipitation patterns, rising sea level, and changes in storm frequency and intensity. Water supply and water management in …
The CBS affiliate in Dallas-Fort Worth had a report this week on what it characterizes as a growing hay theft problem: Yes, hay, is the new target for thieves. Round bales that used to sell for $20 are now topping $175. The night watchman at Master Made Feed in Grapevine has scared off a half …
Continue reading ‘A sign of drought I never thought of: hay theft’ »
If you think California’s water problems look bad now, just wait. That seems to be the message of a new study by a team from the USGS, Scripps, Berkeley and elsewhere who ran detailed simulations of climate change scenarios on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta/San Francisco Bay system. The project provides a useful exercise, not in …
Continue reading ‘Climate change and California water: a bad situation likely to get worse’ »
The following appeared in my twitter feed last night: Could it be that the legendary “forecaster” is resorting to twitter spamming to drum up business? (I have suggested the good folks at Twitter look into that possibility.) I counted 115 identical messages that went out at the same time last night in his twitter feed. …
While I’ve been writing about fire history in the southwest, the issue is coming up all over. As in this last week, from Texas A&M, on using tree rings to tease out fire history in the Appalachians: By piecing together the fire-scar record from numerous trees, he and his students and collaborators learned that fires …
Continue reading ‘Tree rings and fire history in the Appalachians’ »
I am a weather nerd. So it was with great excitement that I unpacked my new official CoCoRaHS RG202 4″ Rain Gauge this evening. It replaces an identical old one that I put up in the back yard in September 1999 when I joined the local National Weather Service office’s CityNet group of volunteer observers. …
For the current water year, Oct. 1, 2010, through the end of August, I’ve had 4.39 inches (11.15 cm) of rain at my house in Albuquerque’s near northeast heights. That’s 51 percent of the mean going back to the 1999-2000 water year. Just one of the months, December, was above my long term mean, and …
As Irene prepares to drop by and visit our eastern neighbors, Kevin Anchukaitis points to this: Evidence of historical landfalling hurricanes and prehistoric storms has been recovered from backbarrier environments in the New York City area. Overwash deposits correlate with landfalls of the most intense documented hurricanes in the area, including the hurricanes of 1893, …
Continue reading ‘On the relevance of paleoclimate studies’ »
Paul Miller and Tom Piechota have assembled a new set of data suggesting a decline in precipitation in the West, and more particularly in the basin that feeds the Colorado River. For this work, they looked at SNOTEL stations, the network of snow measurement sites run by NRCS that feed data into streamflow forecasts. For …