isaacpalomo's blog

We’re all itching to know if the monsoon will deliver this year, especially with the record wildfires, the widespread drought, and the closure of national forests across Arizona and New Mexico. Since our records of rainfall only go back to 1900, it’s hard to tell if the monsoon could get even stronger, or weaker, or if there could be periods of persistently strong or weak monsoons (e.g., ten years in a row of weak monsoons). To get at this information requires longer records of monsoon variability. Luckily, there are many archives of climate in the natural world. (Read More)

Author: Britain Eakin

In the process of generating nuclear-based electricity, large amounts of cool water are needed to  maintain safe temperatures in the reactors. This is why the overwhelming majority of nuclear power plants are located adjacent to bodies of water; they divert water from these sources for cooling, and then release it back into the same sources. Climate change has the potential to significantly impact water availability and water temperatures, especially here in the Southwest; this raises the question of whether nuclear energy production could be affected by climate change as well. (Read More)

Megadroughts, defined as droughts far more severe than anything we have experienced in the 20th century, have occurred numerous times across the Southwest. Are we due for another? As outlined in Jonathan Overpeck’s October post “What’s Ahead for the Climate of the Southwest?” changes in drought and aridity are forthcoming. Warmer regional and global temperatures are driving more evaporation and shifting the position of winter storm systems away from the Southwest. (Read More)

 Now that we (hopefully) have a better understanding of how climate models make long-term, generalized projections, can we use them to model our monsoon to figure out how it might be different under global climate change?  The answer is yes and no, and that has to do with scale. To understand that, we first need to consider how the monsoon works. (Read More)

Figure 1: The upper-level Bermuda High extending to the west in July, when our monsoon begins. The red colors are higher pressures; the center of the Bermuda High is marked by an 'H'. This image is from the National Weather Service. 

Recently, a colleague (Brad Udall, University of Colorado) and I wrote a short overview of climate change in the West—based on peer-reviewed literature—that appeared in the journal Science (Overpeck and Udall, 2010). The big story is really in the Southwest. What follows here is a summary of our findings. (read more)