‘Irene’ in 3-D
As Hurricane ‘Irene’ intensifies in the Caribbean, NASA offers this perspective revealing “an area of deep convection (shown in red) near the storm’s center where precipitation-sized particles are being carried aloft. These tall towers are associated with strong thunderstorms responsible for the area of intense rain near the center of Irene seen in the previous image. They can be a precursor to strengthening as they indicate areas within a storm where vast amounts of heat are being released. This heating, known as latent heating, is what is drives a storm’s circulation and intensification.” For more, click here here to be taken to NASA’s Earth Observatory.…
Imperial Valley and Salton Sea
Aquafornia editor Chris Austin's slide show on the Imperial Valley and Salton Sea.Three deserts and the fourth estate
Perusing a new water book in Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena last June, I found myself reading various passages (sample above) that were strikingly similar to descriptions from a series that I reported and wrote for the Las Vegas Sun in 2008. There was no right response and there were plenty of wrong ones. The story of which wrong ones I chose, along with some notes on intellectual property law as it applies to a steadily vanishing population of original reporters, is in today's Los Angeles Review of Books. Click on the comparison copy and maps to be taken to LARB. Map source: US Geological Survey.
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The Dry Garden: Beware the foxtail
Foxtail: Hordeum murinum in Voorhis Ecological Reserve, Cal Poly Pomona. Source: Curtis Clark / Wikipedia
A romp with your dog in the garden or park should be a happy thing. Life affirming! Usually it is, until your dog encounters the wrong plant. Then it can swiftly become pain and suffering, first for the dog, then for your bank account. Inspired by a recent emergency room visit with a terrier after what seemed at the time like a picture-perfect Kodak moment in a meadow, this is what amounts to a pet owner’s Most Wanted list of plants that can harm dogs, which gardeners should remove and hikers should avoid.
Top of my list, and also the lists of veterinarian Nancy Kay and UC Davis weed scientist Joseph DiTomaso are foxtails. Depending on where you live, these might be one of a number of grasses with needle-like seed heads. After a …
Hoover Dam history at Huntington
Michael Hiltzik, a Pulitzer-prize winning columnist with the Los Angeles Times and author of ‘Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century,’ will be speaking about the Depression-era dam project that made the desert bloom and Colorado River delta die. Date: tomorrow (August 17th) at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Garden. Time: 7.30pm. Admission: Free. Click here for details.
Hiltzik’s book, which was published last summer, is not a water book per se, though the sheer weight of water involved caused earthquakes in the Mojave. It’s not even a desert book. It’s a painstaking history of the politics that led to the dam being built, the heroics and tragedies in the construction, and how the West was won, or ruined, depending on your view point. The picture, above, from the book, captures a failed early schematic for the dam. For an earlier review of this very …
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