There's A Lot At Stake In The Weekly US Drought Map (npr.org) 100
Crippling drought this year has caused more than $1 billion in damage. As it has played out, anyone affected by the drought or trying to manage it has turned to a once obscure map that has become key to understanding what's happening: the U.S. Drought Monitor. From a report: That includes water planners who decide resource allotments. Farmers who need water for their livelihood. Federal bureaucrats who use the map to calculate aid for the Livestock Forage Disaster Program. And then there are citizen scientists like Dave Kitts outside of Sante Fe, N.M. "I think it's a little obsessive, but I check it every Thursday," says Kitts, who has lived on the same 2-acre spread in New Mexico for decades. Dry years like this past one can crust the soil and kill his pinyon trees. "It's just upsetting and depressing to me," he says. "And when it moves the other direction, it definitely lifts my spirits."
Scientist Mark Svoboda started the drought map 20 years ago, when Congress took an interest after drought struck Washington, D.C. He directs the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. "We're covering everything," he says, "from groundwater, stream flow, temperature." In bad drought years like this one, the map has patches of crayon yellow, orange and red that show the levels of drought. Right now, there's a deep crimson bull's-eye in the hardest-hit area of the southwest, where Colorado borders Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. The Drought Monitor map is updated weekly, often taking into account input from hundreds of people -- in addition to scientists. Ranchers and farmers from across the country also send missives to state and national offices, making the map a mix of art, science and farmer wisdom. But it starts with recommendations from state climatologists on any potential changes.
Scientist Mark Svoboda started the drought map 20 years ago, when Congress took an interest after drought struck Washington, D.C. He directs the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. "We're covering everything," he says, "from groundwater, stream flow, temperature." In bad drought years like this one, the map has patches of crayon yellow, orange and red that show the levels of drought. Right now, there's a deep crimson bull's-eye in the hardest-hit area of the southwest, where Colorado borders Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. The Drought Monitor map is updated weekly, often taking into account input from hundreds of people -- in addition to scientists. Ranchers and farmers from across the country also send missives to state and national offices, making the map a mix of art, science and farmer wisdom. But it starts with recommendations from state climatologists on any potential changes.
Re:A water pipeline makes more sense than oil (Score:5, Insightful)
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That’s why I live in Tennessee. There’s literally zero problems. Plus I don’t pay state or local income tax and my property taxes are super low.
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Yes, but you still have to live in Tennessee.
Which is fucking awesome.
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Okay. I live in a place not prone to drought, flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, mudslides or earthquakes.
Alas, it's extremely prone to forest fires so I'm still doomed.
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Yep, that includes a fair part of the Midwest for flooding, the Gulf coast and Eastern Seaboard for hurricanes, a fair part of the Midwest (again) for tornadoes, and California for earthquakes. I might add a fair part of the West for forest fires.
Okay everyone, you should move to....upper East Coast, think Maine, I hear it is lovely this time of year.
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Which are fun!
Re: A water pipeline makes more sense than oil (Score:1)
Wrongo bongo.
Damming rivers and diverting water makes the environment worse. Slowing rivers has warmed the planet. All for so called clean energy...
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My answer to both questions is solar thermal energy. Sunshine provides a gigawatt of power per square kilometre; the question is how to transduce that into useful work in a cost-effecti
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The usual objection is that it would take several gigawatts of power per "reverse river"
Technically it only takes 1.21 gigawatts to make the river of time flow backward.
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Or just get some perspective. According to TFA the drought has cost $1B. There are 330M Americans. That is $3 each. That is about as close to a total non-problem as we can get.
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More perspective: Trump's Twitter-beef with China cost farmers $12B.
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And the money went to the Treasury. Where does all the money collected in taxes go? That's right, to the Treasury. The tariffs put in place by Trump was how the federal government was originally funded before we decided that every single want of every single person had to be controlled from a national level.
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The Point of the Map is that drought tends to move about a lot. So doesn't effect those 330 M Americans at the same time. Please learn to think with some perspective.
Re:A water pipeline makes more sense than oil (Score:5, Interesting)
Everything you've said is false. I work at UNL and I know people who actually work shifts to update the US Drought Monitor (USDM). I'm not involved with that work, but I've learned quite a bit about what drought is and how the USDM is created.
Drought is based on conditions relative to climatological normals for that particular location. Climate is generally averaged over 30 year periods, so droughts are abnormally dry conditions relative to the average over the past 30 years. While the current D4 (exceptional drought) conditions are around the four corners area, which is generally arid, that's just where it happens to be abnormally dry now. You can look back over the drought monitor archive [unl.edu] and you'll see drought conditions in many other areas.
Drought occurs when conditions are abnormally dry. Deserts exist where it's normally dry. In any location, water shouldn't be allocated in ways that are unsustainable. The High Plains are semi-arid, but they're not a desert. Agriculture in that region is driven by extracting water from the Ogallala Aquifer at rates far faster than the aquifer can be recharged. The best options are to bring water from other areas, which can be expensive, or to limit water use in a way that's more sustainable.
When water is brought in from other locations, it's referred to as an aqueduct rather than a pipeline, and such things do exist. For example, Los Angeles gets a substantial amount of water from the Los Angeles and Colorado River aqueducts. The Los Angeles aqueduct is 419 miles long, so water is being transported over quite a distance. The original poster is simply recommending a much more extensive aqueduct system to help alleviate droughts. It's reasonable, provided water isn't being transported from other areas is an unsustainable manner.
And no, not all deserts have been deserts for thousands of years. Sometimes that change happens over shorter time scales, though certainly beyond the 30 year definition of climate. For example, the Sandhills of western Nebraska are now semi-arid, with grass growing in sandy soil. Several hundred years ago during the Medieval Warm Period, western Nebraska was quite a bit drier, and the Sandhills were a desert with active sand dunes. Conditions are wetter now, just several hundred years later, and the dunes are stabilized by the grasses. Transition in and out of desert conditions doesn't necessarily require thousands of years.
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No. Stop living in the desert. The "drought areas" are deserts and have been deserts for thousands of years. Diverting water from one place to another makes it worse.
Umm, you don't really mean that....
On your first point, I'll offer something personal:
My family homesteaded several generations ago and started farming and ranching in a remote area near the Oklahoma & Kansas border. Family diaries describe the land as fertile and green, with native grasses growing knee-high or higher.
When I was a young child my grandfather and I took walks together in a pasture of native buffalo grass. He pointed out mostly dry mud holes around two to three feet deep that were the si
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So what was once a green and fertile area has since become a desert. Tough luck, eh?
Yes I guess so but look, you have had LOTS of warning it was time to move on. Maybe after the third time you had to dig the well deeper that should have been a clue that things are not going your way there and its time sell off the cattle and pack your things.
Where do you get this idea of entitlement from that rest of use should enable you to maintain a dairy in what is becoming a desert?
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It isn't a dairy, just grazing cattle. We never invested in irrigation, so the only water we pumped was for drinking.
We were no more entitled to our family farm than you are your front lawn.
We're all in this together.
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I don't consider my lawn an entitlement. I live in the country too. I have a lawn but its supported entirely by rain fail, and whenever it might pull out of the ground on its own. I have well but I use it for drinking bathing and the occasional washing of things but not for watering a lawn.
I have been known to water the vegetable garden when the plants are small and in hot months. Water is plentiful here; so is wood for heating. I have moved before and I would move again if those things changed, and th
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No. Stop living in the desert. The "drought areas" are deserts and have been deserts for thousands of years. Diverting water from one place to another makes it worse.
But, but, "nice weather"!! "Not bad old flyover country!"
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The ancient Romans did it with what we call a siphon.
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Of course something so practical to transport water from the land of plenty to the land of drought will never be built.
Sure, we could spend billions of tax dollars on a pipeline, and spend billions more on electricity to run the pumps ... or we could stop growing subsidized crops in the desert.
Another resource (Score:4, Informative)
It even has data on dissolved oxygen and turbidity as well as the usual volume information.
confess... (Score:1)
I watch it too. Do not even live in the southwest. A few years ago cali was dark red. Now it is light yellow/white.
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu... [unl.edu]
vs
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu... [unl.edu]
I also watch the lake levels at http://lakepowell.water-data.c... [water-data.com]
Just semi interesting. Next year is shaping up to be a 'dry one' http://graphs.water-data.com/u... [water-data.com]
Re: Fix it by building THE WALL (Score:1)
Are these two part of the Russian trolls everyone talks about trying to mess with our social perceptions?
I live in the southwest United States (Score:2)
It's gonna be interesting because unless either a) the predictions of scientists 95% are completely wrong or b) technology changes drastically to make desalinization cheaper/easier whole cities are going to be emptied out. Parts of California can start up desalinization plants they built i
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As noted by the late Sam Kinison,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:I live in the southwest United States (Score:4, Interesting)
You live in a DESERT. You should not be living there.
Living in a desert is fine if you like the desert and are happy with cacti and rocks. The problem is people that move to the desert, install huge irrigation systems, and grow lawns that look like the green grass of England.
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Yeah lets put them all in california, texas, new mexico and arizona. Oh wait that is a desert.
The 3rd world problem is one of corruption. Fix that and many of the 3rd world issues go away. Until the people of the world decide to do something about that nothing will happen. Including electing a 'game show host'. The US can *not* in any way sustain the entire worlds population. We are not there! You need to take hold of your elected officials and tell them what you need or get new ones.
Most 3rd world i
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Something will be done when the problem is real (Score:2)
Meanwhile the wealthier parts of my city look like they've been terraformed there's so much green.
Hint: There is no actual problem as long as this remains true.
You may think there will be a problem in 20 years but when all the money is saying no problem is imminent, you can be more relaxed.
Think of it this way - if in 20 years there is a problem you have a HUGE amount of water reduction the city can engage in (by limiting water to those areas outside you note are so green) to provide water for important u
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The ocean fish are voting with their fins, the insects are voting with their deaths. How long before the bottom of the food chain affects your bunny world?
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they're gonna blame the people there for not doing anything about it, never mind that most of those cities are relatively poor and even the big ones have a small number of well to do with the rest pretty much dirt poor.
Phoenix, Vegas, Albuquerque, SLC, etc have plenty capital resources to start addressing the problem they choose to use those resources other ways. As for many of those other cities they need to STOP building. Sorry but they are as we type here aggressiveness developing real estate toward more water intensive use and higher population while the supply dries up before their very eyes. Then after lining their pockets even the poor folk as their modest homes increase in value and they use home equity as an AT
Cows and Keyline: Restoring Desert Grasslands (Score:1)
Re: Cows and Keyline: Restoring Desert Grasslands (Score:2)
My enthusiasm evaporated, (Score:3, Funny)
this is dry reading.
Stop moving to where the "weather is nice" (Score:3)
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Nice weather means clear skies. Without rain. Stop moving to dry areas and then complain that there is no water. Move to Minnesota. Land of 10,000 lakes.
I know, right?
"Our weather is so nice! haha, you idiots in flyover country!"
"Er, would you mind sending us some water?"
Another Resource (Score:3)
Those interested should also look at http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/ [noaa.gov], the Web site for the Climate Prediction Center. This has predictions of rainfall and temperatures in the short-term, medium-term, next month, and next three months. It also has links to drought maps, both the subject "United States Drought Monitor" and maps predicting the evolution of droughts for the current month and the next three months.
More about how the USDM is created (Score:2)
The USDM map is updated during weekly shifts that run from Monday to Wednesday. Some are at NDMC in Lincoln, NE, by employees of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Sometimes the map is updated at other locations by USDA or NOAA employees.
There are five categories of drought ranging from D0 (near drought) to D4 (exceptional drought), and they're clearly defined [unl.edu] based on observations. Despite this, the USDM map is more arbitrary than many might think. If you click that link, you'll see a variety of indic
Stop posting resources! (Score:4, Funny)
Please guys, use private messages, or even encrypted services. These are valuable resources. They have science in them. They are related to climate change. The only way these resources will continue to stay useful is if Trump doesn't find out about them.
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To prevent Trump from finding out, we need to make sure the conservative talking mouth on radio and Fox news do not get wind of this. If that happens, drought will become another Thing Not Happening.
Of course (Score:2)
This tells you everything you need to know:
"Scientist Mark Svoboda started the drought map 20 years ago, when Congress took an interest after drought struck Washington, D.C."
There have been occasional short and long droughts across the US forever. Grapes of Wrath, anyone? But it suddenly becomes "of interest" to the Federal government when congress people suddenly can't (have some illegal lawn care worker) water their lawns.
The current "crisis" is mostly one of reporting; utterly pedestrian in it's extent