This feels a bit unseemly, but I’m frankly enormously proud to have won a Society of Professional Journalists “Top of the Rockies” award for my work last year on forest health, fire, politics and policy in the mountains of the West: The driest January through June in New Mexico history came down to this: For …
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The ubiquitous Connie Woodhouse (one of the stars of The Tree Rings’ Tale) has been working with a team using tree rings to reconstruct the flow of the Indus River: Dr. Woodhouse did the reconstruction of the water flow level in River Colorado in the US. She is working on a similar project for River …
Tom Swetnam, head of the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research at the University of Arizona, who helped hugely with my book The Tree Rings’ Tale, has been named a Regent’s Professor, “an honored position reserved for faculty scholars of exceptional ability who have achieved national and international distinction.” He’s a great guy, well deserved recognition.
In my my tree ring book, I focused nearly entirely on their use in studying climates. But tree rings are good for so much more, as in this example: Earlier this week, Royal Commission staff visited the Conwy valley, to work with Margaret Dunn, the director of the Dating Old Welsh Houses project in evaluating …
When I was thinking about how to write a book about climate science for kids, measuring the weather made sense to me. As a journalist, it’s my favorite science to write about because of the opportunities to tie science to everyday experience. And any kid can set up a thermometer and rain gauge in their …
I first noticed it while I was out in the mountains of northern New Mexico back in the mid-1990s with Karl Karlstrom, a University of New Mexico geologist. I had tagged along on a summer field camp mapping exercise for a feature I was doing, and spent a good part of the day shadowing Karl …
River forecaster Tom Pagano, late of Portland, Ore., and Australia, is on the road working on a book about river forecasting, so naturally he’s ended up in Thailand. In a post today, he talks about a language dilemma forecasters face: A phrase like the “worst case scenario” is a double-edged sword. This is the kind …
We spent Saturday at the Bosque del Apache, a wildlife refuge south of Albuquerque. It’s early in the season for the well-known sandhill crane wintering grounds, but in addition to cranes we saw mobs of pintails, a cormorant, a family of grebes (I’m reasonably certain they were westerns, though they’re tough to tell at a …
In a worth-reading piece today in the New York Times, Robert Crease uses this example to illustrate the disconnect between our ability to measure things and our ability to effectively use our ability to measure things: Is the ability to measure tiny levels of toxins making us safer, or leading us to spend enormous sums …
I am not an expert in branding. So I do not know whether renaming the iconic Very Large Array is a good idea. What I do know is that when the idea was proposed, hilarity ensued. I do know that covering this story will be fun for months to come: Proposals will be accepted via …
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