The week that was, 12/12-18/2010
Pineapple Express rains hit Southern California. Map: National Weather Service. Click on the image for your forecast.
“I call La Niña the diva of drought for Southern California. But the rainfall looks like El Niño.” — Jet Propulsion Laboratory oceanographer Bill Patzert, Rainstorms to keep drenching Southern California, Los Angeles Times, December 19, 2010
The Pineapple Express’ arrival not only signals the start of [Southern California’s] annual rainy season, but also threatens to unleash huge low-elevation downpours, which by Christmas Eve (next Friday) could amount to 8 to 12 inches adjacent to southern California’s mountains outside Los Angeles and San Diego–enough rain to provoke flooding and mudslides, particularly along westward facing slopes. — Pineapple Express to bring flooding rains, Chicago Weather Center, December 17, 2010
As rain fell outside City Hall on Friday morning, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved the proposed Low Impact Development ordinance. …
The weatherman’s sure
December 18, 2010 National Weather Service icons for Altadena sum up forecasts for heavy rains across Greater Los Angeles and Southern California this weekend. Click on the image to be taken to the National Weather Service and latest flood advisories.
The Dry Garden: color me Western
It takes a hard heart not to swoon when the liquidambars that line so many streets in greater Los Angeles conduct their flaming descent into dormancy. As if entire city blocks drawn together in a season finale weren’t an eloquent enough elegy for a calendar year, the scarlet confetti of crape myrtle trees and the golden last gasp of ginkgos join the orchestra in a way that makes November and December the Southern Californian equivalent of fall back East.
There is, of course, a “but” coming, and it’s a big one. We’re not back East. Although the yearly curtain call of these exotic trees is undeniably glorious, they have a timing problem. It’s barely fall. Winter solstice is just four days away. How bothered you are by this lag depends on how you feel about leaf blowers working on Christmas Day.
Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden in …
Juicy new website
We all want the cleanest possible electricity, but to understand what that might eventually be, it helps to understand what fuels juice up our outlets now. This is an introduction to a new link from the editor whose day job is to compile Aquafornia, the newsfeed of the Water Education Foundation. At her new website, mavensmanor.com, Chris Austin can’t seem to stop herself from teaching and offers a selection of tutorials on California water and power. This mavensmanor link looks at electricity.…
‘A perfect drought’
The "bathtub ring" around Lake Mead revealed during the last decade by the Southwest's persistent overdraft of Colorado River water. Photo: Glen MacDonald / UCLA. Source: PNAS
Sod’s law would have it rain across California as a suite of papers explaining how a “perfect drought” is gripping the American Southwest appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That disarmingly dewy reassurance from the sky (we don’t capture or store most Southern California rain) doesn’t make the central warnings in Climate Change and Water in Southwestern North America any less true, or the need of our region to reform the way it manages growth and resources any less pressing. Click here to read the PNAS special series of papers edited by UCLA geographer Glen MacDonald and including contributions from the Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick and Arizona State University’s John Sabo.…
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