The week that was, 12/19-25/2010
Detail of fishing net tapestry "Kalama 1" by Mary Babcock, part of "Hydrophilia" at Hawaii Pacific University. Click on the image to be taken to the university website.
“I think it’s seasonal. The nets seem to wash up during the winter.” — Artist Mary Babcock, maker of tapestries from old fishing nets, Ocean Meditations, Honolulu Star-Advertiser, December 19, 2010
Mexico will leave part of its Colorado River allocation in Lake Mead for the next three years, slowing the decline of the drought-stricken reservoir and possibly delaying the onset of water rationing in Arizona and Nevada. — Colorado River deal aids US and Mexico, Arizona Republic, December 21, 2010
Enough water poured from Los Angeles streets to supply well over 130,000 homes for a year. — In a region that imports water, much goes to waste, Los Angeles Times, December 24, 2010
… with our watersheds nicely saturated …
Yes, this is what a La Niña looks like
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 …
2010: An ‘unusual’ year
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 …
Las Vegas growing pains examined
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, …
A shortcut around damp writing
Rain is good for most things in Southern California, except the news, where it wreaks havoc with language. For those who simply want to find out how much rain fell without being subjected to a feverish boob’s deployment of “lash,” “dump,” “slam” etc, a link to the Los Angeles/Oxnard online weather data page. According to this, as of yesterday, downtown Los Angeles has received 4.61 inches of rain in December alone, 4.29 of it in the last four days. This is a lot, roughly a quarter of what a good rain year might give us in 12 months. More is expected today and in the coming week. To check your forecast, click here.
This drenching, known among weathermen as the “Pineapple Express” because of the tropical system enticed into our Mediterranean climate zone, is rare, but not as rare as tomorrow’s lunar eclipse coinciding with winter solstice. Click here…
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