The Dry Garden: Joy to the Valley
Posted on | December 24, 2010 | 1 Comment
When the Valley Performing Arts Center opens to the public in February, it will be down to others to convey the thrill of seeing such a remarkable new venue rise from the Campus of Cal State Northridge. Admiration here is reserved for the landscape architect who encircled the center with 173 native trees, then punctuated the courtyard with a Dr Seuss-worthy assembly of succulents while achieving a tenfold reduction in the site’s previous water use.
That landscape architect is Stephen Billings of the Santa Monica firm Pamela Burton & Co.
Click here to keep reading in the Los Angeles Times about the new garden at the Valley Performing Arts Center.
A river (would have) flowed through it
Posted on | December 23, 2010 | 1 Comment
The last of five days of rain was subsiding as Wynne Wilson took this photograph of the Loma Alta Debris Basin in Altadena, California at 3:45 p.m.on December 22nd. It is one of more than 150 such structures set in upstream canyon tributaries to the Los Angeles River, San Gabriel River, Santa Monica Bay, Dominguez Channel, and Santa Clara River watersheds.
Yes, this is what a La Niña looks like
Posted on | December 22, 2010 | 3 Comments
Source: NASA. Click on the image for a NASA explanation of the "Pineapple Express," in which a jet stream carries moisture from near Hawaii over the American Southwest.
KQED’s Climate Watch, David Zetland’s Aguanomics, LA Observed and the LA Times are among the websites and news organizations shaking seeming contradictions from their collective umbrellas. Yes, this is a La Niña year, and yes, these are typically drier than normal. This being a far stronger than normal La Niña, chances were strong that it was going to be far drier than the already dry average across the American Southwest.
The short answer to why we’re having such a wet dry year is that we’ve had a rare incursion of a tropical rain system called “the Pineapple Express.” The longer answer might be that it is an indicator of climate change. We are not the only ones experiencing weird weather. From snowbound London, George Monbiot answers critics/skeptics who mistake weather for climate. Click here to keep reading
2010: An ‘unusual’ year
Posted on | December 20, 2010 | No Comments
Weather watchers have been waiting for climatologists, particularly Bill Patzert of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to eat crow. Since late summer, equatorial Pacific currents have led climatologists to believe that a record La Niña weather pattern will aggravate drought in the American Southwest. Patzert led the pack with warnings. Then rain across Southern California was early and steadily mounted, with December preliminary totals so heavy that Patzert is quoted in the Los Angeles Times tonight saying, “I think we’re going to crush the record for December.”
Whether one receives this as good news, or merely weird news, depends on how one takes a year that, as the Times report sketches, has bucked every notionally normal trend in Southern California. Traditionally hot summer months have been cool, a normally cooling autumnal stretch produced record heat, treacherous Santa Ana winds have been decorous and now what experts agreed would be a dry winter is poised to break rainfall records. To watch those records falling, go to Jessica Hall’s post on LA Creek Freak for the rain geek’s best links to rainfall gages.
For those battling the rain, take heart. We could all be trying to get in or out of northern Europe, which is blanketed with snow.
Las Vegas growing pains examined
Posted on | December 20, 2010 | No Comments
Architect Robert Fielden. Photo: Steve Marcus / Las Vegas Sun. Click on the portrait to be taken to "Boom-bust era leaves architectural scars across valley" in the Las Vegas Sun.
All but a den of developers accept that the runaway building across the Las Vegas valley during the last twenty years was wrong. Yesterday in the Las Vegas Sun, staff writer Patrick Coolican and photographer Steve Marcus recounted a tour with Southern Nevadan architect Robert Fielden of the still ravishingly beautiful Mojave basin. Assessing the architecture of the boom, Fielden likened damage done by home builders to that of mining camps. The upshot is a slice of Western history as full of mistakes as it is of potential to learn from them.
If Coolican’s name sounds familiar, it may be because he was briefly lured from Southern Nevada to California to write on city news for the LA Weekly, but last month returned to Las Vegas, where he was for state legislature watchers the smartest voice in politics and is now emerging as an equally gifted and surprising environment writer.
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