Word: snowmelt
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...maintain this level in the face of greater anticipated flows down the Rhine River (thanks partly to accelerated snowmelt in the Alps), the Dutch are radically revising traditional flood-management thinking. Instead of trying to contain floods, they will accommodate the extra water flow by allowing predesignated areas to flood. The strategy is called Living with Water. Near Nijmegen, the oldest town in Holland, a sparsely populated strip of land that is home to farms and a nature reserve will be allowed to flood to spare the more heavily populated areas downstream. Birds in the nature preserve can fly away...
...lying country that faces the sea and drains 92% of the snowmelt from the vast Himalayan mountain range, Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable places on the earth to global warming. Already, sea levels are rising in the Bay of Bengal and pushing salty water inland, lowering the productivity of rice cultivation in the south of the country. Farmers are adapting by switching land over to prawn farming, which tolerates saltier water...
...succeed, they might not have to. The visitors at the graveside included leaders of Beijing environmental groups, reporters from national newspapers and a film crew. Together they make up a loose network opposed to what they consider the devastation of natural resources in a part of the country where snowmelt from the Himalayas irrigates rivers throughout China and Southeast Asia. Already the network has helped delay approval of two impoundments on the upper Yangtze and Salween rivers. Yet in taking on state-run companies and political interests, the environmentalists face daunting odds. Says activist Xue Ye of the Beijing-based...
Scientists have documented a troubling shrinkage of the snowpack across the West, owing at least in part to the fact that rising temperatures are inexorably forcing the snow line higher. They have also found that the snowmelt is starting earlier in spring, as many as four weeks earlier in the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades. And that likewise poses a problem. Why? Snow and ice are like natural dams that hold water back during the winter months, when the risk of flooding is highest, and then melt and release it during the dry months of summer when moisture...
...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; and when precipitation...