The Dry Garden: “a strong La Niña”
The blue purple band in the center is a building La Niña in the equatorial Pacific. Source: Jason satellite/JPL. Click on the image to be taken to JPL's El Niño/La Niña compendium of Jason images.
Autumn and early winter are traditionally considered planting season in Southern California because nature can be expected to cooperate. As days shorten and rains come, seeds germinate, newly transplanted saplings deepen their roots and established plants awaken from dormancy.
Yet not all years are created equal, and this coming planting season has all the hallmarks of a tricky one.
National Weather Service predictions for a La Niña cycle are becoming less tentative and more ominous. That means ocean temperature trends in the equatorial Pacific have shifted to the opposite of last winter — a way that augurs drought.
How dry our rainy season might be is unknowable; this brooding La Niña might even produce a …
The life aquatic
Last call for $30 seats for the The Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council September 28th symposium “The science behind the policy: Clean water and natural resources in California.” After September 17th, the price rises to $40. Click here for details. Personally, I don’t understand the logic of the early bird special. If cinemas did that for movies, only well organized people would attend. Then again, the movies don’t have Pacific Institute president and MacArthur Fellow Peter Gleick. Yet. LASGWC panelists also include economics professor Bowman Cutter of the Pomona College and Adan Ortega, former Metropolitan Water District conservation strategist and a memer of the California Board of Food and Agriculture. Environment correspondent Molly Peterson of KPCC moderates.
This post has been updated from a preliminary stub with date and …
Image of the day: Tired in LA
The week that was, 9/5-11/2010
At the news conference announcing Susan Kennedy’s appointment as Chief of Staff, Gov Schwarzenegger said, "We have had incredible accomplishments throughout my administration and I look forward to working with Susan to build upon that foundation and make California once again the golden dream by the sea." Click on the image to be taken to the governor's website and the original announcement in November 2005. Kennedy has been the strategist behind Schwarzenegger's failed water policy.
Schwarzenegger, like all of his predecessors except risk-averse Gray Davis, has tried to mediate the water war and will, like them, leave with the big decisions still to be made. — Dan Walters, Governor will pass the buck on water, Fresno Bee, September 5, 2010
Despite more than three years of meetings and studies, the committee working on the plan has come to little or no agreement on any of the big-ticket questions. —…
The Dry Garden: Orb weavers
In the oldie but greatie department, The Dry Garden this week reprises a 2005 foray by two leading entomologists through the haunts of the most common garden and household spiders of Southern California. For those who didn’t get snared the first time, and who, like me, love spiders, click here. Or to find Dry Garden events for September, click here. Or for information about the Spider Pavilion at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which opens September 26, click here.…
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