America Burning

America Burning: The Yarnell Hill Fire Tragedy and the Nation's Wildfire Crisis from Weather Films on Vimeo.


More on the Granite Mountain Hotshots and the Yarnell Hill fire here.

Winter

Winter from Paul Klaver on Vimeo.

2014 Gulf of Maine Shrimp Season Cancelled

ThinkProgress, via nc links:

The Gulf of Maine Northern shrimp fishery has never been big. But the season, usually between December and May, helps make ends meet for Maine fisherman during otherwise difficult winter months, before the lobsters and tourists arrive. In 2012, the value of the Gulf catch was about $5.1 million. Historically, as much as 25 million pounds of shrimp have been caught in the Gulf of Maine. The last time the fishery had to shut down, way back in 1977, just 1 million pounds of shrimp were landed. Regulators closed the fishery the following year, and since then, shrimp populations have rebounded to record highs.
The problem looks bleaker this time around. The annual shrimp survey in 2012 revealed the lowest abundance of adults ever recorded in the survey’s thirty-year history.
“I think everyone was startled by what we saw in 2012, and there was a lot of pressure to close down the fishery for the 2013 season,” said John Annala, Chief Scientific Officer at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. “The survey this summer found just 20 percent of the 2012 record low, so it has fallen off incredibly sharply.”
Perhaps most worrying is the fact that juvenile shrimp have not been picked up in a survey since 2010. Northern shrimp live about five years, so the lack of younger shrimp for three years straight may mean empty nets for years to come.
“During the last ten years the water temperature in the Gulf of Maine has been running about 2.5 degrees Celsius or about 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the previous one hundred year average,” Annala said. “We don’t know what the thermal threshold of this species is, but the Gulf of Maine has always been the southernmost extreme of their range, so we probably don’t have much wiggle room.”
Even if Northern shrimp prove themselves to be more heat tolerant than scientists predict, the warmer waters in the Gulf of Maine are proving deadly to the shrimp’s food supply, tiny zooplankton. Last spring, the usual surge in plankton never happened. Many species of plankton are also at the southernmost end of their thermal tolerance. Warmer waters are also making the Gulf more hospitable to shrimp predators like dogfish and red hake.

Between overfishing and climate change, our oceans are going to be hit pretty hard in the not-too-distant future.

National Geographic Photo Contest, Part 2

Best one I saw:

The Messengers: Taken on May 26th, 2013, this was a dissipating low precipitation thunderstorm near Broken Bow, Nebraska, that produced one of the best lightning shows I have ever witnessed in my storm chasing career. Even more beautiful was when the lightning lit up these incredible mammatus clouds in the night sky. These type of clouds are often associated with severe thunderstorms, and their ominous and foreboding appearance is a message to all that severe weather may be on its way. (© Anne Goforth/National Geographic Photo Contest) #

More here.

 

How Big was Haiyan?

Huge:

Haiyan is the strongest storm to ever make landfall, according to Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at Weather Underground, a Web site often quoted by the best weather experts. Masters knows severe weather data better than anyone I’ve encountered, and his blog is filled with fascinating facts. The “strength” of a cyclone, typhoon or hurricane—they’re all the same storm, just different names used in different parts of the world—is determined by the top speed of sustained winds, not gusts. According to Masters, Haiyan had sustained winds of 190 to 195 mph when it struck the Philippines, making it the strongest cyclone ever at the time of landfall.
It was also the fourth strongest cyclone ever recorded, according to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Hawaii. Three others had higher sustained winds while out at sea, then weakened before hitting land: Typhoon Nancy in 961, with 215 mph winds; Typhoon Violet in 1961, with 205 mph winds; and Typhoon Ida, in 1958, with 200 mph winds. All three eventually hit Japan. The second strongest storm at the time of landfall was Hurricane Camille, which struck Mississippi bearing 190 mph winds.
It’s important to realize that even a modest rise in speed can cause a huge increase in damage, because the power in wind increases as the cube of speed; a wind that is twice as strong delivers eight times as much power. Camille obliterated towns and the landscape. If the same storm hit Miami or New York City today, Masters says, the damage could be half a trillion dollars. Building codes in southern Florida require the highest wind resistance in the world, Masters says, yet the rules have only been in effect for a couple of decades and many buildings are older than that.

While it has gotten a good bit of coverage here, imagine what things would be like if this thing hit the U.S.  We'd be hearing about it for months.

Hurricane Sandy Aftermath and Recovery Roundup

This:


The Rider And The Storm from RYOT on Vimeo.


and this:


A Year of Recovery After Hurricane Sandy from The New York Times - Video on Vimeo.


and this, from someone who was slated to run in the New York Marathon and ended up volunteering in the aftermath: 

DeAngelis asked if we minded taking general care packages door-to-door. As for how to find the homes where the real need was, we were instructed to drive around sniffing out desperation.
“Look down a street and if it’s a disaster, go there.”
A short, friendly, high school senior advised me on the best approach: just thrust a bag at them and say, “This is for you.” Asking if they need it means they’ll say no, she said.
“Is it a pride thing?” I asked. She shrugged. “I think they just think other people probably need it more.”
It was just past 4:30 and already dark in the powerless section of the borough. The temperature was dropping fast, and not the healing, ice bath kind of cold. Harsh and getting harsher.
All we could see was what was illuminated by the headlights as we wound around trash, furniture, and mystery objects. It was hard to distinguish between what was dismantled during clean up and what the storm destroyed, and I didn’t try for long, because I was squinting for upward facing nails.
When we detected human-size movement, we hopped out. Christine mastered the art of getting people to accept the care packages: Beg them.
“We have a ton of food and supplies, will you please take some, for our sake?”
It wasn’t true. Garbage bags, diapers in the right sizes, and flashlights were scarce. But the residents kept claiming they weren’t the worst off. “Give it to those people over there. They need it more,” we heard from men and women standing in front of frames that used to hold up walls.
The exceptions were gloves and socks—no one turned those down. One woman shook her head at me, saying, “I’m fine,” but as I put the socks in her hand, it closed around them.
At one house where men were working below ground level, a tiny cloud of light from a lantern glowed up from the basement. I yelled, “Does anyone in there need socks?” They cheered.
Back at the car, I found a woman nodding as Christine listed what we had left. The woman didn’t say anything, she was just nodding. Christine handed me items and once my arms were full, she finally spoke. “I don’t know if I need it—I will need it—I just don’t need it now—I can’t think.” I asked if I could take the stuff inside and she nodded again. I walked in and set it in a corner of a dimly lit kitchen. Then I looked up to see four people at a table, a candle flickering between them, all watching me silently.

Wow.  It is hard to imagine such devastation, and yet people didn't want to take any assistance.

Fallout From the South Dakota Blizzard

Scientific American:

Ranchers are both trying to bury animals and haul them to roadways where renderers will remove the bodies. But while the snow melt has allowed for roadways to be cleared, the pastures in many areas are flooded or too muddy to access, making it hard to collect carcasses and to care for surviving animals.
Silvia Christen, executive director of the South Dakota Stockgrowers Association, said most cattle ranchers do not carry private insurance policies because they are cost prohibitive and have exclusions that would have ruled out coverage in this situation anyway.
She said the ranchers' only financial assistance would be found in a disaster program that is part of a proposed U.S. farm bill. But the U.S. government shutdown and delays in passing a new farm bill have left ranchers with no assistance.
Ranchers are not able to even consult with their U.S. Farm Service Agency representatives on how to document their cattle losses, since the FSA workers are on furlough because of the shutdown, she said.
Christen said each calf lost has a market value of roughly $800-$900 and each cow is valued at about $1,800, so the total losses could easily be in the tens of millions of dollars.
"This is a major financial loss for these ranchers," she said. As well, she said, the emotional loss has been wrenching.

A Modern Farmer article has some gruesome pictures of dead cattle.  It is notable that there are things the federal government does for rural folks, even though a large percentage of Congressmen representing rural areas don't seem to realize that.  My prayers go out to all those ranchers.  I can't imagine how terrible that is.

South Dakota Blizzard Kills Thousands of Cattle

This is from earlier in the week, but I thought there was some interesting information in it:

South Dakota ranchers are facing devastating losses in the aftermath of a blizzard that dropped as much as four feet of snow in western reaches of the state. It has been estimated as many as 100,000 cattle have been killed because of the snowstorm, devastating herds that many ranchers rely on to make a living, FoxNews.com reported.
Sprinkled among melting patches of snow, thousands of carcasses now litter the flatlands where the cattle once grazed. The cattle likely died of either hypothermia or suffocation under the growing snowdrifts, said Silvia Christen, executive director of the South Dakota Stockgrowers Association.
“It’s anyone’s guess how drastic this loss will be. The cattle were soaked to the bone. Then the wind and really heavy snow started -- it just clung to them and weighed them down,” Christen told Reuters. “Many of them just dropped where they were walking.” In all, it has been estimated most of the ranchers in the state lost between 50 percent and 75 percent of their herds, as Christen said the state is now looking at cattle deaths into the “tens of thousands if not pushing 100,000 at this point.”

I was surprised so many cattle would die in the storm, but then there is this:

 The snowstorm arrived so early in the season this year that the cattle were unable to grow their heavier winter coats.

One article also mentioned that the cattle were still on more open and remote summer pasture ground, and that normally ranchers move the cattle to more sheltered valleys for winter, but that the storm was so early that it hit before they had moved them. It is unbelievable how fast the weather changes there.

Shutdown Affects Weather Prognostication

Sure, you think weather forecasting is bad anyway, but it could be much worse without government input:

On Monday afternoon, a line of storms hundreds of miles long crossed the Appalachians and struck cities on the Eastern seaboard. Earlier that day, tornado watch was issued, stretching from New York City to Washington, D.C., that lasted until 5 p.m.; broadcasts and web journalists picked up the news and transmitted it to millions in the affected region.
Most people who heard about that tornado watch learned about it from journalists and journalist-meteorologists who work at private media companies. But, perhaps without realizing it, everyone who heard about it depended upon the meteorologists, one level down and less visible, who work for the National Weather Service, a program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Americans, in other words, rely daily on the “vibrant public-private-academic partnership” that exists in the United States around weather, according to Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd, president of the American Meteorological Society. Every part relies on every part — and every part is suffering for the shutdown.
In a special blog post, Shepherd unfolds how the shutdown is damaging American meteorology. It’s easy to think, he writes, that “well, we are still getting our weather forecasts and warnings, and I still have the information from TV.”
But this, he says, is deeply naïve.
"Private sector companies and broadcast stations," he says:

are essential partners in the weather enterprise. However, most of the satellite, Doppler radar, and observational data are from federal sources. The major forecast models are run at NOAA facilities. Federal predictions centers and Forecast Offices issue warnings. I can’t imagine a major potato chip maker saying that it could survive without potato farms. The point herein is that there is a vibrant public-private-academic partnership and each component is essential.

(Emphasis mine.)
Those resources are still working, but all maintenance on them has halted. Many employees working at them have stopped being paid. American weather news depends on the American government.
But it goes beyond the news. Marshall proceeds to inventory what he sees as the cascading consequences of the shutdown. Some consequences are technical, he says: The United States might fail to develop weather models to rival Europe’s. The shutdown might exacerbate the upcoming, possible gap in functioning government weather satellites.

Again, I have never understood the Republican party's war on government scientific research and data gathering, other than that it prevents the private sector from screwing over citizens.  Most of the things the Republicans want to cut outside of social spending I think are the coolest things government does.  That is what keeps me from voting for those jackasses.

Water's Scarce in Central Texas

Texas Monthly:

Central Texas lakes are at their lowest levels in more than 60 years, and Lake Travis and Lake Buchanan, the reservoirs northwest of Austin that supply water to the region, now stand at just 33 percent full. These lower levels have significantly reduced customer traffic and forced many lakeside business owners to make difficult decisions.
The closing of Carlos’n Charlie’s was the latest and most visible business impact of the drought. In the past, thousands of patrons would arrive by boat and car to watch the restaurant’s annual Fourth of July fireworks show and listen to live music. But the boat docks have been unusable for more than three years.
“We hung in there for the first bad year, the second bad year, and now the third bad year,” said Pete Clark, co-owner of Carlos’n Charlie’s. “We knew that if we hung on for a fourth, we would create a hole we couldn’t dig out of.”...
The Lower Colorado River Authority is the state-created organization that controls the water in Lake Buchanan and Lake Travis, as well as a 600-mile stretch from San Saba to the Gulf Coast. It is the L.C.R.A.’s duty to balance the needs of both those upstream in the Austin area, where the population around the lakes has boomed, and those at end of the line in Matagorda, Wharton and Colorado counties, where rice production drives the local economies.
State water laws give the downstream users first priority and two years ago, with Texas struggling through its driest year ever, the L.C.R.A. released roughly 120 billion gallons of water to rice farmers. That summer, very little rain fell to replenish the lakes while Central Texas experienced record-breaking streaks of 100-degree temperatures. By the end of the year, Lakes Travis and Buchanan had about half as much water as they had at the beginning of the year.
The L.C.R.A. took emergency measures in 2012 and 2013 to cut off the water supply to most downstream farmers, but according to Mr. Clark, by then the damage was done.

Lake Buchanan and Lake Travis are at about 1/3 of full pool volume.  Climate change plus irrigation plus population growth plus industrial growth equals trouble in the burgeoning desert.  Since 1900, we've seen this run-up of population growth against the water cycle so many times, I don't understand why we keep repeating it.  Anyway, the days of Texas growth are running up against the limits of natural resources. Don't believe the hype.

The Year's Best Infographics

Wired features 13.  This is my favorite:

Also interesting (ah, Christmas parties):

What Happened at the Yarnell Hill Fire?

Here's a fascinating story about the Prescott Hotshot team who died in the Yarnell Hill fire this summer:

THE GRANITE MOUNTAIN crew could see Donut on the UTV racing across the flats. They could see the helicopters and air tankers pivoting from Peeples Valley to Yarnell and dozens of emergency vehicles, lights flashing, speeding down Highway 89 toward Glen Ilah, the subdivision where Truman lived. It would have been difficult for the hotshots, who had been trained to help however they can, to sit idly by and watch houses burn. They would have been thinking of their fellow firefighters placing themselves in harm’s way.
With conditions changing so dramatically, Eric and the crew’s leadership—Steed, Clayton, Travis, Robert—would have gathered for a moment on the ridge to discuss their options while the other hotshots sat perched on white granite boulders watching the drama unfold.
Do we hunker down in the black and do nothing but watch Yarnell burn? Or do we head down there, do some point protection, and try to save a couple of homes? Eric would have made the decision. He couldn’t have imagined that, by heading for town, he was leading his crew toward a series of increasingly compromised circumstances, each more desperate than the last.
He radioed out that Granite Mountain was moving back toward Yarnell.
Donut drove Eric’s supe truck to the edge of Yarnell. There, he and the Blue Ridge hotshots joined a few engine companies who were wetting and widening a contingency dozer line—a last effort to stop the fire from burning straight down Highway 89.
Donut radioed to Steed. “Buggies are parked. I’m with Blue Ridge. If you guys need anything, let me know.”
“Copy. I’ll see you soon.” It was the last time Donut spoke to Steed.

Do we stay safe or do we try to do more?  I would guess that thought process goes through most firefighters' heads right before they go into a situation they won't be able to get out of.   The whole story is amazing and emotional.  I feel for the lookout who survived, along with all of the survivors of the men who died in the fire.

Food Deserts?

Wired features a map from Nathan Yau showing the distance to the nearest grocery store (click to view):

Last time I looked at where major grocery stores are across the United States. Where you shop for groceries changes depending on what region you live in, but hunger and nutrition carries less variance. It's important that everyone has access to healthy food options, so I looked at the data, this time from Google and from a different angle. Instead of where stores are, I looked at how far away the nearest grocery store is.

The map above shows a sample of locations across the country, and line length represents distance to the nearest store. For example, in areas with a lot of lines headed to one spot is an area with fewer grocery stores. In contrast, mostly small line segments mean more grocery stores, and therefore less distance to travel to buy groceries.
Places where residents have limited access to grocery stores are called food deserts. However, there's no exact definition of what limited access means or what a long distance is. Some set a 10-mile marker whereas others say a store should be less than a mile away where there is a lot of pedestrian traffic.

I'm sorry, those areas aren't "food deserts,"  they're God damned deserts! That's why people don't live there, and that's why they don't have groceries.   Let's take a look at a map of federal lands in the west:

You know why the federal government still owns that land?  Because it is the God damned desert, that's why.  The federal ownership also keeps people from living there, but not like the lack of rain does.

Very Ugly Storms

Featured at Wired:

                               South Dakota, 2011

Supercell thunderstorms are characterized by a cycling, cylindrical vortex of air that moves upward off the ground, which is also known as a mesocyclone. Not only does it sound badass, but it produces some of the most visually striking weather on Earth.
Each summer since 2009, photographer Mitch Dobrowner and guide Roger Hill have driven through the Great Plains and high deserts of the United States in search of these jaw-dropping forces of nature. When they find them, Dobrowner pulls out his camera and takes breathtaking black and white photos that capture the enormity and intensity of these churning atmospheric formations.

There are several awesome photos over there.  Those storms fascinate me, but I am really glad we don't sit in tornado alley.

Peak Water Out West?

Peter Gleick thinks so (h/t nc links).  A few of his data points:

• Groundwater is disappearing in California; the Great Plains; Texas (tables in this report (pdf) show continuous and often massive declines in almost all Texas groundwater systems); and elsewhere in the West, because our laws and policies ignore the fact that surface and groundwater are connected. Contributing the problem, water managers and legislators typically put no restrictions on groundwater pumping, leading to inevitable, and inexorable, groundwater declines.
• In the Lower Tule Irrigation District in California, demand for water has grown over the past two decades from 250,000 AF/year to 450,000 AF/year, much of it supplied by overpumping groundwater. In parts of the district, the average depth to groundwater in 1983 was 50 feet. In 2003, groundwater levels had declined to 75 feet. Today it is 125 feet, and some wells 300 feet deep are going dry.  In April 2013, John Roeloffs, a farmer and member of the Lower Tule Irrigation District Board, noted “Some guys are drilling wells 800 feet deep.”
• There is more and more and more evidence of declining snowpack in the western US as the climate warms.

I would anticipate that we have peak combined population and agriculture out there.  I'm not sure what will happen, but I think he's right about this:

 Maybe it is time to grow less rice, alfalfa, cotton, and pasture with flood irrigation. It is past time to retire the green lawn as an acceptable landscape option in arid climates.

Yeah, growing alfalfa in Arizona doesn't make much sense to me.  Putting on inches of water between cuttings just doesn't seem like the thing to do in the desert.  I would say some of those acres will be going fallow pretty soon.

Lightning Strikes Seven Times?

Tom Dunkel reports on the legendary park ranger who claimed to be struck by lightning SEVEN times:

I’ve come to talk with Dickey Baker about the legacy of Lightning Man. When Baker was a teenage employee, he crossed paths with Roy Sullivan, who died 30 years ago and undoubtedly is the most famous ranger in the history of Shenandoah National Park, if not every national park.
Baker saw the tan ranger hat that Sullivan kept in his truck as a souvenir. It had two scorched holes where a lightning bolt supposedly entered and exited. “He used to haul it around with him,” recalls Baker, who also saw Sullivan’s wristwatch that got toasted black by another bolt.
Forty-one years after his debut in the “Guinness Book of World Records,” Ranger Roy Sullivan continues to hold the dubious distinction of being struck by lightning more than any known person. Not twice. Not three times.
Seven times.
That’ll attract attention. In the early 1970s, Sullivan did an interview with expat British broadcaster David Frost and appeared on the quiz show “To Tell the Truth.” In 1980, Sullivan was featured in an episode of the TV series “That’s Incredible.” More recently, Discover magazine (2008) included him on its list of memorable survivors, along with the Soviet World War II pilot who bailed out of his plane at 22,000 feet without a parachute and the hapless sailor who endured being adrift at sea for 76 days in a five-foot raft. The Web site Cracked.com (2009) selected Sullivan as one of the seven “Most Bizarrely Unlucky People Who Ever Lived.” (Tsutomu Yamaguchi was named most unlucky, having been at ground zero when atomic bombs fell on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) In 2010 Sullivan’s misadventures were the basis of a humorous South African TV commercial for, of all things, energy-saving milk cartons. His birth-chart reading is posted on AstrologyWeekly .com in the heady company of Elvis Presley, Bill Clinton and Leonardo da Vinci.

The whole story is fascinating.  I had a close enough brush with lightning for my taste, and while this guy might have exaggerated a bit, I bet he got struck by lightning at least once or twice.  I'll pass.

Fires and Floods

Robertscribbler attributes massive fires in Russia, followed by an immense rainstorm and flood, to the effects of climate change:

Earlier this year, drought and heatwaves blanketed Siberia and Yakutia. But late July, this region had begun to erupt in a series of extraordinary wildfires that blanketed almost all of northern and eastern Russia in very dense smoke. By early August what is perhaps the worst rainstorm in the history of this area of Russia had begun to form. As of the writing of this article, on August 14, major storms and flooding continued with no immediate end in sight.
Major heatwaves and droughts in extreme northerly regions of Siberia are an anomalous event linked to human caused climate change. Rapid sea ice and snow cover retreat combine with temperatures that are warming at a rate of .5 degrees C each decade over this region to increase the likelihood of such extreme events. Methane and organic carbon stores in the thawing tundra steadily release under this heat forcing and likely provide an amplifying feedback to summer heating events by locally providing more greenhouse gas emission and also providing another fuel store that is available to wildfires. In some of these wildfires, there are reports coming in that fires burn as far as 3 feet into the ground, taking out root systems and stumps along with the trees that burn above ground. Reports of burning ground have also been trickling in (Hat tip to Colorado Bob)
Such burn events are anomalous enough. But for a flood that covers a 1 million square kilometer area to immediately follow in the wake of such amazingly large and widespread fires is anything but normal. Atmospheric patterns that link major weather systems and increase their intensity can be attributed to the formation of powerful heat dome high pressure systems along with weakened and meandering Jet Stream waves. Rising atmospheric heat caused by human warming adds to the density and strength of heat domes (identified as becoming more intense by meteorologist Stu Ostro). Meanwhile erosion of the Jet Stream caused by reduced snow and sea ice cover (identified by Dr. Jennifer Francis) is implicated in a host of problems including more intense and persistent droughts and storm events along with the increased likelihood that weather systems will link up as north to south weather patterns deepen, back up, slow down, and elongate.
A massive ocean heat dome to the south over the Pacific adjacent to China and sea ice and snow cover remaining near record lows must be taken into account when looking at features that likely contributed to the extreme swings from drought, heatwave and fire to massive deluge and flood in Russia.
One last point to consider as a likely contributor is the fact that for each degree (Celsius) of human-caused temperature change, the hydrological cycle amplifies by about 8 percent. This means that rates of evaporation and rainfall are now about 6 percent more intense than they would be in the world of the 1880s. When combined with powerful new weather features like a mangled Jet Stream and immense heat dome high pressure systems, an amped up hydrological cycle further inflates an already extreme environmental condition.

 The impacts of extreme weather will continue to grow.  As we reach a carbon dioxide tipping point things will get crazier yet.

Dust Bowl Redux

Via Big Picture Agriculture, this is depressing:

“We had eighteen months of no rainfall,” says Ogden, whose curly gray hair, ready smile and blue eyes make him look startlingly like the actor Gene Wilder. “We sold a lot of equipment last year. When you’ve had people who have worked for you, it’s hard to let them go.” As he considers what will happen to his family if his farm fails, he starts to cry. “I’ve got college degrees, but with my age it’s going to be hard to find something in this job market.”
Ogden’s friend Matt Rush is also struggling to make ends meet. He recently took a job with the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau in Albuquerque, four hours from home. He, too, cries as he considers his prospects. “This is who we are,” he says. “When your livelihood becomes your identity, you can’t just stop.” He pauses, tries to talk himself into optimism. “It’ll take a while to get her Sunday clothes on,” he says, referring to the land. “But she’ll look good. It’s so wide open. You can see the sun coming up and the sun going down. You can see every star in the heavens at night. When it’s green, it just feels so alive to me. When it rains, you can see it in everybody’s faces—how relieved they are. Contributions go up in church on a Sunday after it rains.”  Eddie Speer homesteads a small farm outside Lubbock. His wells have almost run dry; his wife, Laura, worries that she might not have enough water for cooking, washing the dishes and bathing. “We wake up every morning, and if we didn’t know God was taking care of us, we couldn’t get through the day,” he says. “We pray for rain—in church and privately. We ask God to bring rain and bless our farms.” .....I want Speer’s prayers to be answered. But I fear that Ed Moore might be more realistic. Moore looks over the land on which he rides his 15-year-old Appaloosa, Lady, at the end of each workday. You can almost see the sigh forming in his chest. “I don’t think we’ll ever run out of water [entirely]. But it’ll get so expensive we’ll have to quit,” he says. He stops to gather his thoughts. “You ask about this land. I don’t have a clue why I love it. It’s flat. Very hard to make a living. If I were really smart, I’d go somewhere where the average rainfall is forty inches. But this is home. And I don’t like to fail.”

That is so sad.  I think Ed Moore is right.  The rain-fed Midwest is where it's at.  Hopefully it stays rain-fed.

1940 vs. 2010

Via Ritholtz, the Census Bureau has a fascinating graphic with their release of 1940 census records (click on infographic to enlarge):

Definitely check out the employment, housing and marital status part.  Almost 42% of the population worked in manufacturing or agriculture in 1940.  Only 17.7% of farms had running water, and only 31.3% had electricity.  And 11.6% of females age 15-19 were married.

This map is also pretty wild:

The impact of the Dust Bowl is amazing.

NASA Photo of the Day

July 17:

A Waterspout in Florida
Image Credit & Copyright: Joey Mole Explanation: What's happening over the water? Pictured above is one of the better images yet recorded of a waterspout, a type of tornado that occurs over water. Waterspouts are spinning columns of rising moist air that typically form over warm water. Waterspouts can be as dangerous as tornadoes and can feature wind speeds over 200 kilometers per hour. Some waterspouts form away from thunderstorms and even during relatively fair weather. Waterspouts may be relatively transparent and initially visible only by an unusual pattern they create on the water. The above image was taken earlier this month near Tampa Bay, Florida. The Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida is arguably the most active area in the world for waterspouts, with hundreds forming each year. Some people speculate that waterspouts are responsible for some of the losses recorded in the Bermuda Triangle.