"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

-Jonas Salk

Monday, April 4, 2011

A Few Drops of Rain in Austin


Everything looks leafy and springlike in that slightly gnarly Texas sort of way, but we appear to be moving headlong toward a nasty brown summer. We got a little rain this morning, but given how dark and windy it got, it was a disappointment.

Almost the entire Southern tier is in a severe water deficit. Some of this is due to La Nina conditions, which I had heard to be in retreat but which still seem robust by the numbers. But it's a bit scary in the context of expected trends in the southwest.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

which I had heard to be in retreat but which still seem robust by the numbers.

The MEI page was last updated a month ago (March 4th). In the last four weeks, the La NiƱa conditions have weakened, and forecasts are for ENSO neutral conditions by June (PDF).

Jim Prall said...

Just saw a tweet for a weather stats interactive graphing site that really impressed me. You might find this relevant to the OP as a means to look back at rainfall amount, cloud cover, and temperature data for a particular locale.
http://weatherspark.com/#!graphs;a=Canada/ON/Toronto
Scroll the mouse wheel to zoom out to data back to 1979.
Viewing the stats for my home town of Toronto, I noticed a strking change in cloud cover from very high in the 90's down to a lot less in the past decade.

David B. Benson said...

All your rain is coming up here.

Steve Bloom said...

That's very interesting about Toronto clouds. Any idea as to what's behind it?

David, where is here?

David B. Benson said...

Steve Bloom --- Pacific Northwest

dhogaza said...

"here" (glub glub) is (glub) the PNW (glub glub) as pointed out above.

We practically need scuba gear and the buddy system just to safely walk outside this spring.

While a friend told me yesterday that presently there are grassland wildfires in New Mexico, south of Carrizo (Ruido) which isn't far west of Roswell.

Looking out side here in PDX, it's hard to believe anything could be burning anywhere at the moment!

David B. Benson said...

And here is the effect on BPA's power generation: BPA Balancing Authority Load and Total Wind, Hydro, and Thermal Generation, Near-Real-Time. Note the recent almost complete absense of thermal, which includes the 1300 MW ALtaVista coal burner in Chehalis and the scheduled outage of the one nuclear plant, which shuts down in the spring for refueling.