drought

By Bob Henson The atmospheric spigots have been turned off across most of the U.S. over the last several weeks. According to the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor report from Nov. 10, more than 27 percent of the contiguous U.S. has been enveloped by at least moderate drought (categories D1 through D4). This is the largest […]

China’s Poyang Lake, which was swollen by El Nino rains earlier this year, has dried up dramatically since mid-September as the region’s dry season arrived 54 days ahead of schedule. The freshwater lake, which can grow to 1,737 square miles—big enough to cover an area larger than Rhode Island—sees regular seasonal variations but has started […]

There is growing evidence that man-made climate change is contributing to individual extreme weather and climate events, according to the latest analysis by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Global five-year average temperature anomalies (relative to 1961–1990) for 2011– 2015. World Meteorological Organization The report, released at COP22 in Marrakech, finds that greenhouse gas emissions raise […]

By Catalin Trif California is drying up. The ever increasing demand for freshwater has taken its toll and the state’s reservoirs are only at 46.4 percent of their capacity. Now, by using imagery provided by the Landsat 7 and Landsat 8 satellites, we can also see how the reservoirs have changed during the 21st century. […]

Five years of drought and over-use of water from feeder rivers has seen Utah’s Great Salt Lake shrink by almost 40 percent. The changes were dramatically revealed in before-and-after photos taken by the Landsat 8 satellite, recently released by NASA. Before and after images taken in 2011 and 2016 reveal dramatic shrinkage of Farmington Basin […]

Would you eat oranges grown with oil wastewater? You might be already without knowing it. Wonderful Citrus, the U.S.’s largest citrus grower and the company behind the popular Halos mandarins and Bee Sweet Citrus, another huge citrus grower, are using leftover wastewater from oil companies to irrigate their citrus—while also using pink ribbons to sell […]

The questions come after talks, on twitter, in the days’ incoming tide of email—sometimes even in old-fashioned letters that arrive in envelopes. The most common one by far is also the simplest: What can I do? I bet I’ve been asked it 10,000 times by now and—like a climate scientist predicting the temperature—I’m pretty sure […]

A study released in Science Advances Wednesday finds strong evidence for severe, long-term droughts afflicting the American Southwest, driven by climate change. A megadrought lasting decades is 99 percent certain to hit the region this century, said scientists from Cornell University, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space […]