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If you live in the Southwest, no doubt you know a little bit about our weather. It's interesting here. You likely know we have a monsoon during the summer, with awesome thunderstorms and flash floods, and our wettest winters and biggest floods happen when there's an El Niño event. We've also been hearing a lot about global climate change - and there's already a lot of evidence that it's happening here now. One big question is: how will our monsoon change in the future? (Read More)

After reading a climate modeling paper in the journal Nature that discusses the speed of warming in different ecosystems, I wanted to hear how plants were moving in response to a changing climate from someone with their boots on the ground. The Nature paper “The Velocity of Climate Change,” published in December 2009, stated that plants and animals that require a narrow temperature range to live will be forced to migrate in order to remain in the same climate in which they evolved. Those that can keep pace with climate change will adapt. Those that cannot will likely perish (Read More). 

http://southwestclimatechange.org/impacts/water/groundwater

More than 35 percent of Arizona’s land and almost 60 percent of New Mexico’s land is used for farming and ranching. Thus climate change-related impacts on the Southwest landscape will most likely have significant impacts on the Southwest’s agricultural sectors. Changes in water availability, vegetation cover, carbon dioxide levels, and frequency of extreme events like flood, drought, or frost will impact crop and forage production, increasing costs for both producers and consumers. (read more)

In the West, as much as 70 percent of the region’s precipitation falls during winter. Arizona and New Mexico are critically dependant on this winter precipitation. The region’s two main water lifelines, the Colorado River and the Rio Grande, tap the winter snows in the Rocky Mountains for approximately 70 percent of their annual water flow. (Read more)

Groundwater provides drinking water to urban and rural communities and supports agriculture and industry, all of which have helped enable rapid population growth in Arizona and New Mexico. Population expansion, however, has not been without its consequences. It has led to increasing groundwater withdrawals that are outpacing the rate at which the vital resource is naturally replenished. As a result, the region’s groundwater resources are among the most overused in the United States (continue reading).