After a rainy December, many states now have lower-than-normal snowpacks.
Drought
Posted inArticles
Mapping Earth’s hidden water
A new NASA satellite will measure the planet’s soil moisture.
Posted inArticles
When the atmosphere ‘goes bananas,’ wildfires do too
2011’s huge wildfires and what they portend. Spoiler: More dead trees.
Posted inJanuary 12, 2015: What Are We Thinking?
A Hot Day’s Night
New fiction from the author of ‘The Windup Girl.’
Posted inJanuary 12, 2015: What Are We Thinking?
Can Aldo Leopold’s land ethic tackle our toughest problems?
An argument for ‘voluntary decency.’
Posted inJanuary 12, 2015: What Are We Thinking?
Introducing the idea of ‘hyperobjects’
A new way of understanding climate change and other phenomena.
Posted inArticles
New cloud seeding study from Wyoming
Research renews the debate about whether scientists can really make more rain.
Posted inArticles
Residential wells run completely dry in the Central Valley
The drought is not an abstract threat for families in Porterville, California.
Posted inNovember 10, 2014: Fallout
California’s sweeping new groundwater regulations
Will the law finally mean better aquifer management for the drought-stricken state?
Posted inArticles
Dispatch from a young farmers confab
How better dirt can conserve water, save farming and help feed the West.
Posted inArticles
Colorado’s river economy worth $9 billion
Outdoor recreation businesses say state water plan must do more to protect rivers.
Posted inArticles
How the hot and dry West is killing Rocky Mountain forests
A new report summarizes how climate change is accelerating tree death from fires, bark beetles and drought
Posted inSeptember 1, 2014: Lost in the Woods
A dam difficult job
California’s drought through the eyes of a water manager.
Posted inArticles
Shaken and stirred in California’s recent earthquake
How seismic events can make drought impacts worse.
Posted inGoat
Summer rains in a drought-plagued state
How much does a monsoon season relieve drought?
Posted inAugust 18, 2014: Alaska's Uncertain Food Future
The prickly pear as California crop
Can an overlooked succulent help salvage toxic soils?
Posted inGoat
To protect hydropower, utilities will pay Colorado River water users to conserve
Here’s a sure sign that your region’s in drought: you stop paying your utility for the privilege of using water, and the utility starts paying you not to use water instead. Outlandish as it sounds, that’s what four major Western utilities and the federal government are planning to do next year through the $11 million […]
Posted inGoat
Colorado water users gird for first statewide plan
Last year, 14 years into a regional drought, forecasts predicted that as many as 2.5 million Coloradans could be without sufficient water supplies by 2050. And yet the state still had no official plan to deal with its looming water crisis. In response to the troubling situation, Governor Hickenlooper issued an executive order: Colorado needed […]
Posted inGoat
Colorado River Basin groundwater levels drop even faster than reservoirs
When Lake Mead is full it’s the largest reservoir in the U.S., capable of holding two years’ worth of water from the Colorado River. But the Southwest has been trapped in a 14-year drought, and the states Mead feeds – Nevada, Arizona and California – are thirsty. The reservoir is now only about half full […]
Posted inGoat
California gears up to fine water wasters: Should we turn our neighbors in?
Five years ago, when south-central Texas was suffering through its driest year in more than a century, public officials in the city of San Antonio turned in desperation to a new tactic to enforce water conservation: They dispatched the police. From April of 2009 and on through the rest of the year, off-duty officers and […]