tagged w/ extreme weather events
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Underground water supplies are being used to keep rivers flowing in the seasons when they are supposed to be replenished
The pond at St Peter's Church in Snailwell, Cambridgeshire, is surrounded by clumps of bulrushes and thick oak trees that give it a timeless English appeal. Coated in a dusting of snow, this small body of water looked the epitome of rural charm. Only one odd feature upset its picture-postcard appearance. Around noon every day, automated pumps just above the pond are switched on and for the next few hours 400,000 gallons (1.8m litres) of water are sent cascading down a brick-lined gully into the lake.
The reason for this daily influx is straightforward. If engineers from the Environment Agency had not started pumping water into Snailwell's pond every day this winter, it would have disappeared weeks ago, the victim of a drought that now threatens much of England with a summer of parched landscapes, rivers reduced to trickles and possible hosepipe bans ahead.
"When you use the word drought you become a hostage to fortune. Events can occur at the last minute to make you look silly," said Andrew Chapman, a senior environment planning officer with the agency. "But the position is becoming very serious. In simple terms, unless we get a downpour that lasts for several weeks in the very near future, we are in trouble. There could be severe water shortages in many parts of the country." Worst affected areas would include the Midlands, East Anglia and the south-east of England, say agency officials.
The impending crisis – which could have widespread consequences for farmers, food production, tourism, industry and domestic life – has been building for the past 18 months. Reservoirs were already low this time last year. Then came 2011, the driest year in England and Wales for 90 years.
In addition, we are now experiencing the driest winter on record, though this could change over the next few weeks, meteorologists have said. The crucial point is that boreholes and reservoirs are now at "notably low" or "exceptionally low" levels. At the RSPB reserve at Titchwell Marsh in Norfolk, springs have dried up and many of the birds, including populations of bearded tits, marsh harriers and reed warblers, are now struggling to find food. Fresh water plants and animals such as water voles are also suffering. "This is a very worrying situation to have at this time of year," said Grahame Madge, an RSPB official. "This is an incredibly important wildlife site that we cannot afford to have damaged. We are going to have to look very carefully at how we manage water supplies there in coming years."
In addition, rivers have dried up in several areas. These include tributaries of the Welland in Lincolnshire and the Chess in Buckinghamshire. Fish have become stranded in pools and had to be rescued by agency workers and moved to areas where water is flowing.
"We sometimes have to carry out such rescues in summer," said Ian Barker, the Environment Agency's head of water, land and biodiversity. "But we are having to do this in mid-winter, the one time of year when there is supposed to be plenty of water and rainfall. That is certainly not a healthy state."
The impending water crisis is particularly worrying for farmers. At this time of year, many build storage lagoons to hold water that they can use later in the year to irrigate crops. But to be allowed to dam up water that would otherwise flow into rivers, farmers have to be given permits by the Environment Agency.
So far this year, 345 applications for such stores have had restrictions placed on them by the agency, limiting the powers of farmers to provide water for their crops during the forthcoming growing season.
"We are facing drastic reductions in yield," said Andrew Nottage, who runs the Russell Smith farm at Duxford, Cambridgeshire. Among the crops grown by Nottage are potatoes and onions – vegetables that have a high demand for water. "We can switch crops to less water-intensive types, but there is a problem doing that," he said. "Farmers are locked into long-term contracts with supermarkets to provide them with the vegetables they want to provide for the British public later in the year.
"It is therefore difficult to switch crops even if you know that you are going to be in trouble when it comes to supplying water for them."
The problem for Britain is that East Anglia is one of the nation's principal food-producing regions. It is also the driest in the country. "Rainfall patterns here are similar to Israel," said Nottage. "That makes farming a tricky business some years."
To address the shortage of rainfall last year, the Environment Agency estimated that it would need 20% above average for the months from December last year to April this year. To date, the rains have been 30% below average.
This month has also been cold – but dry. Instead of being replenished by rain percolating through the ground, boreholes are being used to pump what water they have left to prevent rivers and streams drying up – as is being done at Snailwell.
"If we don't prevent the pond drying up, then the streams that feed from it will disappear and the local wildlife will really suffer," said John Orr, a manager at the Environment Agency.
More at the linkUnderground water supplies are being used to keep rivers flowing in the seasons when... more
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This group is for documentation of the extreme climate/weather events that have taken place around the globe and that continue to affect our water, agriculture, ecosystems, economy and way of life. Connecting the dots on this is essential to preparation, adaptation and survival of the human and all other species.
If ever there was a time when we need to look beyond the politics and propaganda this is it. If you care to help in connecting these dots and in bringing awareness of this reality in order to prepare and adapt and hold those who need to be leading on this with us accountable, then please join our group.
Thanks.This group is for documentation of the extreme climate/weather events that have taken... more
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Torrential rainfall pummelled South Korea killing at least 36 people Tuesday and Wednesday. Several buildings collapsed early Wednesday in one town 100 kilometers northeast of Seoul, which claimed 13 lives, 10 of which were university students on a volunteering trip.
A mountain mudslide in Seoul caused 17 deaths. Reports of other casualties are being reported from around the country. South Korea's emergency responders suggest global warming is changing weather patterns.
Bloggers are blaming Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon for damage in the capital. He's reduced the flood preparedness budget by nearly 90 percent from 2005.
South Korea's massive Four River Project seeks to control flooding, but is not focussesd on protecting watersheds, which is where environmenalists believe attention is needed.
Most of the damage from flooding is not just because of global warming, but because the government didn't prepared well. The Korean government and Seoul city tend to seek remedies to flooding with infrastructure projects. But specific environmental measures and forest management are the best solution.
Record downpours across the country have flooded more than 720 homes and burried another 20 in mudslides say initial reports. 17 roads in the capital closed. 66,000 homes lost electricity.
An average of 863 millimeters of rain falls during South Korea's monsoon season. This weeks's intense rain has almost doubled the average. And it's not over, another 250 millimeters are forecasted to hit South Korea on Thursday.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS3DTE8x4wkTorrential rainfall pummelled South Korea killing at least 36 people Tuesday and... more
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My next installment of relevant Earth News that reports about the environmental issues most important to the health of our planet and each other.
In this issue, heatwaves, extreme climate events, deniers and their backers, the Keystone XL pipeline and community news on fracking.
Thanks for supporting this endeavor!
More to come.
I moved the introduction out and the report here now as it was getting buried.
Thanks for the comments.My next installment of relevant Earth News that reports about the environmental issues... more
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Drought conditions across Somalia are likely to cause further loss of life if nothing is done.A serious shortage of food as a result of a severe drought is driving a large number of Somali herders into the capital.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Friday that the drought is getting worse in the southwestern region of Gedo, where local residents are in dire need of water, food, and medical aid.
The UN body noted that many people have left Somalia's Middle and Lower Shabelle regions and are arriving in the suburbs of Mogadishu every day.
The regions worst affected by the drought are the areas bordering northeastern Kenya and southeastern Ethiopia, such as the villages of Wanlaweyne, Toro-torow, Furuqleey, Farsooleey, and Dugulle in the Shabelle regions.
At least 12,000 people have been displaced by the worsening drought in many parts of Somalia, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
The UN's food agency, the World Food Program, is appealing for donors to provide tons of food in order to halt a humanitarian tragedy and to stop more people from leaving their homes in the hardest-hit areas.
In some villages in central Somalia, men have left their families behind and have headed for the city seeking food.
About 2.5 million people need food aid across Somalia, according to the World Food Program.Drought conditions across Somalia are likely to cause further loss of life if nothing... more
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Drought, flood, record heat and record snow--this year had it all. Living on Earth’s Jeff Young asks weather experts whether climate change pushed these extreme events. Their answers carry a warning about the weather of the future.
CURWOOD: It's Living on Earth, I'm Steve Curwood. The other day it was colder in southern Florida than northern Maine, while some western states had just set daily records for high temperatures. It's been that kind of year-- extreme. Twenty-ten is bidding to go in the record books as one of the warmest, but it's the craziness of the weather, rather than just the heat that has scientists concerned. Twenty-ten, they say, stands out for the number and intensity of extreme weather events. It appears climate change is tilting the odds in favor of more of the kind of heat, floods and even snows that 2010 brought us. Living on Earth's Jeff Young has our story.
YOUNG: Jeff Masters has seen some pretty wild weather. As a hurricane hunter in the late '80s, he flew into the teeth of some of the biggest, baddest storms. Then he co-founded the internet forecasting site, Weather Underground. There he keeps track of extreme weather events. And Masters says 2010 is the most extreme yet.
MASTERS: In my 30 plus years of being a meteorologist I can't ever recall a year like this one as far as extreme weather events go, not only for U.S. but the world at large.
YOUNG: Countries covering one fifth of the planet's land saw record high heat. Drought altered the world's food trade. Floodwaters inundated parts of the U.S. and Asia with frequency that defied statistical expectations.
TRENBERTH: Isn't that interesting, we have a one in a thousand year event happening every few years nowadays.
YOUNG That's Kevin Trenberth, a meteorologist who leads the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
TRENBERTH: And so, it's the changes in extremes where we notice the climate change. Droughts and floods and heat waves that are outside the bounds of what we'd normally expect. The global warming component is rearing its head in that way.
YOUNG: And 2010 could be a harbinger of things to come, says Heidi Cullen, a climatologist with the non-profit research group Climate Central.
CULLEN: I actually do get a sense that we are really getting glimpses of what the future will look like through some of these extreme events that we've experienced.
YOUNG: I asked these three experts, Cullen, Trenberth and Masters, to choose their top examples of the year's weather extremes. Their list tells us a lot about the interplay of climate change and weather. And it carries a warning about the storms on the horizon for coming generations.
[SOUNDS OF SNOWBALL FIGHT]
Feeling the heat: A NOAA map showing temperature anomalies this
June. (NOAA)
YOUNG: Remember snowpocalypse? Snowmageddon? Those monster storms dumped record piles of snow on the mid-Atlantic, including Washington D.C.
[SOUNDS OF SNOWBALL FIGHT CONTINUE]
YOUNG: This snowball battle in Washington's Dupont Circle wasn't the only fight the snow brought on.
CBS SNOWSTORM NEWS CLIP, SAWYER: That war of words over what this storm means for global warming...
LIMBAUGH CLIP: It's one more nail in the coffin for the global warming thing.
YOUNG: The Capitol's most prominent climate change denier, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, got attention with an igloo on the national mall.
INHOFE: They put a sign on top that said Al Gore's new home!
YOUNG: But climate expert Kevin Trenberth says the Senator's take on the storm is, well, a bit of a snowjob. Increased precipitation events— whether rain or snow— are just what computer models of climate change predict.
TRENBERTH: That's actually very much a symptom of warmer sea temperatures off the coast that are providing extra moisture to produce that huge amount of snow. It's not a sign that global warming is not here, quite contrary in fact.
YOUNG: That extra moisture and warm temperatures kept feeding severe storms in the U.S. Nor'easters soaked New England in late March; a deluge hit coastal North Carolina in October; record rains fell in Oklahoma City in June; and, in May, disaster struck Tennessee.
NEWS CLIP: Massive flooding left at least a dozen dead. Thousands of people have been evacuated after an astonishing 13 inches of rain fell in a two-day period.
MASTERS: That rain event was equivalent to a one in 1000 year event.
YOUNG: That's Weather Underground's Jeff Masters.
MASTERS: You have to go back to the civil war to look at any kind of disaster that effected Tennessee as great. The city of Nashville was basically underwater. And I might add that the record high temperatures were set up and down the coast in the few days accompanying that storm event. And, again, when you have record high temperatures you can have record amounts of water vapor present in the atmosphere capable of causing heavy rains.
YOUNG: By mid summer it was the heat Masters was tracking, first in the eastern U.S.
MASTERS: Well, the record heat was concentrated in mid Atlantic region again, so not only did they have snowmageddon, but they had their hottest summer on record in the DC area. Maybe the legislators there were trying to be told something! I don't know...
cont.Drought, flood, record heat and record snow--this year had it all. Living on... more
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U.S. temperature departures from average during October 2010.
Credit: NOAA/NCDC.
Today’s business pages are packed (as always, it seems) with some of the periodic economic reports that give snapshots of the economy, giving an idea of where things stand and where they may be headed — last week’s unemployment numbers, the September trade deficit, the October oil-price increase and more.
The government’s economic agencies aren’t the only ones who put out reports like this, however. Each month, the National Climatic Data Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), issues its State of the Climate report, and the numbers for October have just come in. The document is packed with enough maps and data to satisfy the wonkiest climate junkie, but for the rest of us, a few highlights stand out:
The average temperature in the U.S. for October was 56.9°F (13.8°C), which is 2.1°F (1.2°C) above the 1901-2000 average, the eleventh warmest on record in the United States. Warmer-than-average conditions prevailed throughout the western U.S. and into the Midwest. Of the nine climate regions, none had below normal temperatures and only two, both along the Eastern Seaboard, experienced a monthly average temperature that was close to average.
No state had below normal average temperatures, while more than half were above-average. Wyoming had its fourth warmest October and Montana its seventh.
That’s for the lower 48 states of the U.S.; for the world as a whole, the numbers are a month behind, since the data takes longer to process and quality control. You can peruse the whole global section of the report at leisure, but here’s the bottom line:
The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for September 2010 was 0.90°F (0.50°C) above the 20th century average of 59.0°F (15.0°C), and tied with 1998 as the eighth warmest on record. September 2005 is still ranked as the warmest September on record.
What makes all of this — and especially the U.S. temperatures — so significant is that we’re now under the influence of the cool Pacific ocean and atmospheric cycle known as La Niña. La Niña, which appears every five to seven years on average, tends to lower global temperatures by about a tenth of a degree C from what they would otherwise have been. Here’s how meteorologist Dan Satterfield puts it on his blog for the American Geophysical Union:
In spite of this, 2010 may end up being the warmest year globally on record. With the La Niña in full bore, we still set 8 record highs for every record low in October…. We are almost certainly witnessing something that has not been seen in all of history. Human interference with the planet’s climate. While there are month to month and even decade to decade fluctuations in the global temperature, there is nothing left to explain the long term rise. Everything except rising greenhouse gases from fossil fuels have been ruled out…
But wait! There’s more! Climate change involves more than just warmer temperatures; it also leads to extreme weather events, and the NCDC report has some data on those as well. One of them is the “megastorm” that battered the Midwest a few weeks ago, bringing rain, snow, high winds and no fewer than 78 tornadoes to the region, along with an atmospheric pressure reading that bottomed out at 28.24 inches of mercury — a record low for a continental storm, and equivalent to a major hurricane. (While scientists cannot say that this particular storm was related to climate change, there is evidence that the odds of certain extreme weather events are increasing). As the National Weather Service put it:
The bottom line is that the storm that struck the Upper Mississippi River Valley on October 26-27, 2010 was a very intense and rare storm, something that is not seen in this part of the country very often. While the minimum sea level pressure may not necessarily be the lowest on record, the storm was undoubtedly one of the most intense on record in the continental United States.U.S. temperature departures from average during October 2010.
Credit: NOAA/NCDC.... more
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