Tree Rings’ Tale – Teacher Feedback
Posted on | January 8, 2011 | No Comments
I was delighted by the National Science Teachers association recommendation of The Tree Rings’ Tale, especially this bit from science teacher Teri Cosentino:
I was so inspired by the book that when a tree was felled on campus, we counted and measured the tree rings to see what happened during the tree’s life during the last 125 years at the school. We compared the rings to actual waterfall data. I used the book to ask students to predict, based upon John Wesley’ Powers trip down the Colorado River, what the weather at our school will be like in 10, 20, and 50 years from now.
Kaching!
River Beat: Good Snow Pack News
Posted on | January 7, 2011 | 3 Comments
At the Dry Lake snotel station near Steamboat Springs in northern Colorado, there’s more than 4 feet of snow on the ground. By snow water content, that’s 32 percent above average for Jan. 7. Snow that melts there flows down into the Yampa River, which flows into the Green, which flows into the Colorado, which is the whole point. In the upper Yampa, snow pack is currently 35 percent above normal for this time of year.
January Colorado Basin Forecast, courtesy CBRFC
You have to go all the way back to 1997 to find a Colorado River Basin year with that’s gotten off to a start this good. That was the message this afternoon from Kevin Werner, forecaster with NOAA’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, during the first river forecast briefing of the 2010-11 water year.
“This is a different kind of year than what we’ve been seeing, predominantly, for the last decade or so,” Werner said.
At Lake Powell, CBRFC’s forecast calls for 9.5 million acre feet of April-July runoff, 20 percent above average. That is the highest January forecast the CBRFC has made since 1997, according to Werner.
2010: The Heineman-Fleck Yard List
Posted on | December 31, 2010 | 4 Comments
I’m having a hard time deciding whether this was the year of the yellow-bellied sapsucker, or of the swimming doves. I’m leaning toward the doves.
The sapsucker was a novice birder’s treat. It showed up Dec. 11, a Saturday. I was sitting in my office at the back of the house and saw it flitting around in the neighbor’s elm tree. It hung around for several hours, dining on sap seeping from wounds in the tree. A juvenile (which is what made the identification possible), and the only “YBS” (as one of my bird friends called it in an email exchange afterwards) reported on eBird this year in Bernalillo County.
But I’ll have to go with the swimming doves. It was the strangest thing. For a couple of weeks back in October, the white-winged doves would light in the edge of the stock tank in our back yard, then one at a time hop in and clumsily swim across.
I picked the doves in part because they’re such stalwarts. Pretty much every time I sit down to watch and make a list, they’ll be there. One could view them as annoyingly ordinary, but I think they’re a great success – good at what they do, far better than the sapsucker, exciting as it was. Just one of ‘em? C’mon.
The table below is the result of 139 observations. The number is the percentage of lists each month for which the species was present. (I think the juncos are above 100 percent sometimes because of the way eBird counts subspecies.) Other highlights of 2010:
- the pine siskins that showed up in February (first time on the yard list), learned how to eat out of the goldfinch feeder, and stayed
- the lack of roadrunners (perhaps a lowlight?)
- the ladder-backed woodpeckers, which are a lot of fun
- the lack of inca doves, which used to be common, but which I haven’t seen since September (lowlight)
- In April, a flight of turkey vultures. I was watching a hawk through binoculars when all of a sudden a giant bird flew right through my field of view. Then another. Then another. I love turkey vultures.
Click through for the full list.
Top Inkstain Posts of 2010
Posted on | December 31, 2010 | 2 Comments
Returning to a fine New Year’s tradition*, I bring you the most-read Inkstain posts of 2010.
The thing is, it’s frankly a crap list, or at least a particularly odd one. It’s not based on some profundity on my part, but rather some weird Googlejuice, drawing random readers who no doubt click, scratch head, then leave, because it wasn’t what they were looking for:
- Dust in the Sahel
- Malaria and Global Warming (depending on how I do the counting, these first two positions reverse – call it a tie?)
- The Sheet Metal Screw Fairy (I’m reasonably certain people leave this post disappointed. It has a certain charm, but is at a bit of a remove from the search terms.)
It’s only when you get to position #4 that you get a real post I wrote this year where I think I actually had something useful to say – Drought, American Style, on my visit to Hoover Dam last October on the day Lake Mead dropped to record low elevation:
We are sufficiently buffered by affluence that almost no one I talked to today had any inkling of what was going on. Just another tourist Sunday on Hoover Dam. The best I got was from one the folks in this picture, who were on a Sunday drive at one of the Lake Mead overlooks. One of them, a Las Vegas resident, knew the lake was way low, and said the solution was simple – somebody needs to have the political courage to make them release more water from Lake Powell, upstream.
For search terms that bring readers to Inkstain, “Sahel” is number one, and I’m happy to see “Lake Mead drought” on the list. But my particular favorite slots in at #31: “the Indian of the group“.
Happy New Year.
* OK, it’s really what I saw some dude do just now on Twitter. Working a holiday shift at the office. Bored.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The New START Bargain
Posted on | December 30, 2010 | 3 Comments
From the newspaper this week, a look at the bargain that was struck to win support for the New START nuke deal with the Russians (sub/ad req), which includes money for a new plutonium lab at Los Alamos to replace its aging CMR building – despite dramatic cost increases and schedule delays since the project was first proposed:
In the short term, the deal ensures money to keep patching up the old CMR building, now 58 years old and well past its “best used by” date. Nuclear weapons scientists analyze plutonium samples in a building long ago labeled unsafe by federal nuclear auditors.
In the long term, there will be money — quite a lot, it appears — to build a replacement.
At this point, in the topsy-turvy politics of Washington, where a deal became the most important thing and damn the details, money appears to have been no object.
Moving Water, Virgin River Edition
Posted on | December 29, 2010 | 2 Comments
I’ve been watching Lake Mead rise remarkably as a result of last week’s storm that blew through Nevada before drenching the Virgin River watershed on the Arizona-Nevada-Utah border area. It looks like Mead will finish December at a surface elevation of about 1086.25 feet above sea level, 2 feet above the level forecast a month ago. That translates to about 170,000 extra acre feet of water.
The flow on the Virgin was remarkable. At the gauge near Littlefield, Arizona, flow at this time of year is typically about 100 cubic feet per second. On Dec. 20, it peaked at at something like 27,000 cfs (they think – tough to measure accurately in conditions like that):
USGS Stream Flow Measurement on Virgin River near Littlefield, AZ, Dec. 2010
Or, seen another way:
Growth and Water
Posted on | December 26, 2010 | 5 Comments
I’m certain this graph is of enormous importance in understanding long range water issues in the west. But I’m not entirely sure how.
It’s single family home starts in the Phoenix (blue) and Las Vegas (red) metro areas over the last decade:
Phoenix, Las Vegas home starts, courtesy St. Louis Fed
What you see here is the housing bubble bursting. Adam Nagourney did a nice job in the New York Times last week of explaining what this means in Nevada, where demographers say population is actually declining – a remarkable fact for what on paper looked in the 2010 census like the fastest growing state in the country:
The state demographer, Jeff Hardcastle, estimated that Nevada had lost more than 90,000 people since July 2008, and expects the decline to continue through next year. He said that before 2007, Nevada had been the top-growing state for most of the past 20 years.
The Economist jumped in with stark employment figures:
Depopulation in Nevada would be particularly unpleasant given the housing overhang in the state that has already driven home prices in Las Vegas down by nealry 60%. Further population exits would increase supply relative to demand, generate more price drops and potentially more defaults. Of course, falling prices could ultimately lead to a new influx of residents attracted by cheap housing. But the adjustment process will be difficult, and the new Nevada economic model will look very different from the old one.
Phoenix also has seen a drop in its civilian work force, though not nearly as great in percentage terms as Las Vegas. But this all leaves me wondering about water. In the short term, it buys breathing room. But in the long term, what will the economic model look like, and what does that imply for future water demand?
The Census and the Water
Posted on | December 26, 2010 | No Comments
Rebecca Hammer at the NRDC makes an interesting point regarding the relationship between last week’s census data dump and water supplies:
[T]he greatest U.S. population growth is occurring precisely where water supplies are going to be the most vulnerable over the coming years.
She’s talking about us in the arid western United States.
River Beat: Conservation before shortage?
Posted on | December 26, 2010 | No Comments
Shaun McKinnon reports this morning on a very interesting proposal under discussion in Arizona:
Under a plan now being considered, water officials would pass up billions of gallons that they could take from the river in 2011, hoping to keep the drought-stricken reservoir full enough to avoid triggering automatic cutbacks. Any cutbacks could deny Arizona and Nevada even more water in 2012.
The sacrifice would be relatively small – 80,000 acre-feet out of Arizona’s annual share of 2.8 million acre-feet – and it would barely be missed. Officials would take all of it from a portion of the water set aside for underground water storage, leaving consumers, cities and farmers unaffected.
Still, the attempt to prop up Lake Mead’s supply underscores how times have changed for a state that worked so hard for so many years to take every drop of river water it could.
You don’t have to be dry to be water short
Posted on | December 24, 2010 | No Comments
Georgia averages 50 inches (127 cm) of rain a year. Arizona averages 13 (30 cm). Which is more likely to suffer water shortages? I’m fascinated by the non-trivial nature of the answer.
The problems of both lakes Lanier and Mead have been well chronicled. At Lanier in 2007, we were within three months of Atlanta running out of water. On Lake Mead, we’re – well, we’re all running around like our hair’s on fire, but we’ve got more than a three month supply sitting in our ginormous reservoirs. You can run the numbers and see some dire scenarios on the dry site of the range of probability, but our hair is substantially less flammable than Atlanta’s.
Lake Lanier
To refresh the important details, Atlanta’s hair-on-fire moment came after what was very much a garden-variety drought, nothing at all out of the normal envelope of climate variability. We’ve made it through a drought far more significant here in the Colorado River Basin in terms of depth and duration, much farther out of the normal range of variability (11 driest years on record, etc.), and yet all the Colorado’s users have gotten their full allocation every year during the drought.
There are two reasons for this. One is a system that was engineered with very large storage as a buffer against multi-year droughts. The second is an interlocking network of institutional arrangements for the distribution of that water that have been used to sort out arguments over how to administer things as the big reservoirs dropped.
The southeastern United States lacks both. Which is a very circuitous introduction to an interesting news release out of the University of South Carolina this week:
Water scarcity in the western United States has long been an issue of concern. Now, researchers studying freshwater sustainability in the U.S. have found the Southeast, with the exception of Florida, does not have enough water capacity to meet its future needs either.
“For more than a century, the Southwest has been the focus of long-running legal disputes over water resources, but the Southeast is now becoming a more contentious region for water use,” said Dr. Will Graf, a geographer in the University of South Carolina’s College of Arts and Sciences.
Graf was part of the team that did the recent “Cadillac Desert” empirical reconstruction in PNAS. While the southwest, Divas of the Arid, got all the attention, Graf and colleagues point out implications for the southeast as well:
“It turns out that the Southeast has a relatively small margin of water surplus for the future,” said Graf.
And we’ve got the institutional and engineering framework in place to try to work out our problems. The southeast is still down near the bottom of that learning curve.
