Word: drought
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This is important because in the West most precipitation falls as snow at higher elevations. Thus, a city like Reno, Nevada, gets, on average, just over 7 in. of precipitation a year, vs. some 70 in. at the top of nearby Mount Rose. During the 1950s drought, for example, a very large portion of the West, along with a big chunk of the Southeast and Great Plains, experienced long-term shortfalls of both winter snows and summer rains. "This is the kind of drought we worry about a lot," says Betancourt--and it's the kind of drought that...
...Drought is more than a precipitation deficit," observes University of Washington climatologist Philip Mote. The real problem, he says, "is that you don't have as much water as you'd like at a given point in time." And that goes for plants as well as people. For accompanying an earlier snowmelt, scientists note, is an earlier start to the growing season, which means that the demand for water by forests, marshes and grasslands--not to mention agricultural crops, lawns and putting greens--is bound to rise. In this context, a "normal" amount of precipitation may not be sufficient...
Indeed, the bark-beetle infestations that are killing trees across the West are attributed to drought (complicated by decades of fire suppression that have resulted in an overgrowth of trees). And nowhere is the beetle infestation worse than in the mountains of Southern California, whose stressed-out forests harbor hundreds of thousands of beetle-killed trees. These trees, some with rust-colored needles still hanging from their limbs, serve as standing fuel for fires, and an effort is under way to remove as many as possible along the roads inhabitants in the San Jacinto, San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains...
...connection between drought and wildfires is strong, says Thomas Swetnam, head of the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. And the most dangerous fires, he says, occur when droughts follow years that are unusually wet. That's because generous rains encourage trees, shrubs and grasses to grow, providing the fuel that stokes forest fires. This pattern of wet preceding dry, Swetnam thinks, helped feed the intense blazes that raged through the Southwest shortly after 1850, taking out huge stands of conifers. So, if a new El Nino materializes later this year, as some experts expect...
...past is an imperfect lens through which to peer into the future, but looking backward provides a glimpse, at least, of the sorts of extended dry spells that those who live in this drought-prone region today should be prepared to endure. The West, observed writer Marc Reisner, has a "desert heart," and we ignore it at our peril...