TCU Athletics moving into a drought

[Cheesesteak]

Stubborn drought is choking the western U.S., stressing plants and humans alike. Ironically, the same weather systems are soaking the East.

Mon, March 08, 2004
By Faye Flam
Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. - Withered hulks of ponderosa and piñon pines dot the mountains of northern Arizona, victims of a persistent drought that is entering its sixth year in the West and raising fundamental questions about how habitable the booming region truly is.

Americans saw spectacular effects of the drought last fall, when wildfires raged across Southern California, killing 24 people and destroying $3 billion in property.

Less obvious, but more profound, are other impacts. Los Angeles' reservoirs are dwindling, the water table beneath Las Vegas is disappearing, and millions of trees in Arizona and New Mexico are dying off.

A continuing drought could wipe out farmers and ranchers throughout the West, from pinto bean growers in New Mexico to cantaloupe farmers in California's San Joaquin Valley. And it could stifle the sprawling growth of the West's swimming-pool-dotted suburbs.

Scientists say this present crisis may reflect the true character of the West - an arid land that Americans have not inhabited long enough to fully understand.

The most infamous American drought, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, led to a collapse of farming across much of Kansas, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. The plowed-up ground that had once been prairie was turned to dust and picked up by the wind. Earlier and more severe droughts probably led to the abandonment of major Indian settlements such as Mesa Verde in Colorado in the 13th century.

Now, the dry times are back.

Since 1999, the Southwest, the central Rockies and western Great Plains have been parched. The year 2002 was the driest of the past 100 years in Arizona and second driest for Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah.

In the last two years in Arizona, the normal winter snow and rain barely materialized, and the summer rain never came.

"There's something awfully big happening when you have all these fail," said Julio Betancourt, a climate expert at the U.S. Geologic Survey's Desert Laboratory near Tucson, Ariz.

Betancourt and other scientists warn that long-term shifts in faraway ocean temperatures foreshadow a dry spell in the West that could persist for many years or even decades. These shifts in the oceans will influence the East, too, possibly bringing more rain and snow to the Philadelphia region.

Scientists agree that wide-ranging "megadroughts" are part of the rhythm of the West and have been for more than 1,000 years. The proof is written in tree rings.

At a lab under the football stadium at the University of Arizona, scientists are analyzing small sections of trees sampled from around the world. They have extracted pencil-thin sections from the trunks of thousands of trees. The scientists match the markings that distinguish the rings with years on the calendar. To go back to the beginning of the last millennium, they sometimes used beams cut for ancient Indian lodges.

Fat tree rings mean wet years; closely spaced ones mean dry. The climate records show the 20th century was unusually wet, a fluke that helped lure millions of people westward. The late 1970s to the late 1990s marked the wettest period of the last millennium, said Betancourt.

The driest period spanned the late 1500s through the 1600s, which may explain why early Spanish explorers thought the land not worth colonizing, said Betancourt. Most of the West stayed abnormally dry for about 80 years then, and there's no reason it couldn't happen again, he said.

Rain in the United States seems to be under the capricious control of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Shifting areas of warmer and cooler areas on the ocean surfaces determine where storms form and where the winds blow them.

In his hilltop office surrounded by desert birds and cacti, Betancourt displays a map on his computer showing relatively warm ocean water in red and cool in blue. Right now an ominous red patch of warm water is sitting off the Atlantic Coast, a situation that began around 1995. When the Pacific shifted to its "cool" phase in 1998, he said, the combination matched that seen in the 1950s, when the entire Southwest faced years of devastating drought.

These ocean temperature patterns are linked with longer-term cycles than the more-familiar El Niño, often blamed for flooding and extreme weather.

For most of the 1980s and early 1990s, a large region of the eastern Pacific was a degree or so warmer than normal at the surface, while a horseshoe-shaped region to the north, south and west was a bit colder. Scientists call this pattern the positive phase of the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO). The positive phase appears to go along with wetter-than-normal conditions in the West and more frequent El Niños.

Around 1998, the pattern reversed, the previously warm regions growing colder. In 2002 the Pacific shifted again to an apparent neutral position and a weak El Niño formed. Some forecasters hailed this as a sign of relief.

Betancourt is less optimistic, thanks to changes picked up in the North Atlantic. Since weather travels from west to east, it's not as clear how the Atlantic affects North America, but Betancourt says changes in its temperature have followed periods of unusual wetness and severe drought in the West.

For much of the 20th century, the North Atlantic was cool, but twice it warmed up, once during the 1930s, when the Midwest suffered the Dust Bowl drought, and again during the 1950s, when drought struck much of the western United States.

Betancourt said the Atlantic's temperature can influence the path of the jet stream, the prevailing atmospheric currents that carry storms across the continent. When the North Atlantic goes warm, the jet stream buckles more, he said, channelling storms coming off the Pacific northward and allowing storm-blocking high pressure zones to sit over much of the West. Often when the West gets dry, the storms slide down from the Arctic into the Mid-Atlantic, as they did during the snowy winter of 2002-03.

While the Philadelphia region got wetter, the West got drier. All over the pine-scented mountains east of the Grand Canyon, the ponderosa and piñon trees are dying.

On the forested campus of Northern Arizona University, Tom De Gomez takes an ax to a dead tree, pulling away the bark to reveal how it died. Once the trees are weakened by drought, bark beetles attack, said De Gomez, an expert on forest health.

The beetles, a normal part of the environment, don't normally kill healthy trees, but the trees here are stressed, he said.

De Gomez has a 1910 picture of some sparse but large trees, taken before the area was logged. Back then there were just 20 to 40 trees per acre, but replanted trees grew in more densely so there are 160 to 1,000 per acre now.

"The tree densities we have right now are not a natural situation," he said. There are just too many trees and too little water. He predicts the ponderosa and piñon pines will simply vanish from some of the most drought-stressed hillsides, replaced by scrubbier and more drought-resistant junipers. That could mean death for birds and other animals that depend on the pines.

Some residents are thinning trees, hoping this will allow those remaining to survive. "It's like having too many people in a lifeboat," De Gomez said.

Something similar has happened to the population of human beings in California. "We have 37 million people here, though most of the state is in a semiarid environment," said Bill Patzert, a climate researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. All those people are creating an unprecedented demand for water.

Californians survived the 1950s' drought by pumping out millions of gallons of groundwater that was left behind by the last ice age - a resource as non-renewable as oil.

There's little agreement on how to react should the West enter decades of drought. Should California try to stem its inexorable growth? Stop irrigating the desert to grow food? What happens when all the groundwater gets pumped out?

Settlers have been remarkably successful in transforming the desert of the American West, wrote Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert, adding, "But the same could have been said about any number of desert civilizations throughout history - Assyria, Carthage, Mesopotamia, the Inca, the Aztec, the Hohokam - before they collapsed."

[Cheesesteak]

In his hilltop office surrounded by desert birds and cacti, Betancourt displays a map on his computer showing relatively warm ocean water in red and cool in blue. Right now an ominous red patch of warm water is sitting off the Atlantic Coast, a situation that began around 1995. When the Pacific shifted to its "cool" phase in 1998, he said, the combination matched that seen in the 1950s, when the entire Southwest faced years of devastating drought.

These ocean temperature patterns are linked with longer-term cycles than the more-familiar El Niño, often blamed for flooding and extreme weather.

For most of the 1980s and early 1990s, a large region of the eastern Pacific was a degree or so warmer than normal at the surface, while a horseshoe-shaped region to the north, south and west was a bit colder. Scientists call this pattern the positive phase of the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO). The positive phase appears to go along with wetter-than-normal conditions in the West and more frequent El Niños.

Around 1998, the pattern reversed, the previously warm regions growing colder. In 2002 the Pacific shifted again to an apparent neutral position and a weak El Niño formed. Some forecasters hailed this as a sign of relief.

Betancourt is less optimistic, thanks to changes picked up in the North Atlantic. Since weather travels from west to east, it's not as clear how the Atlantic affects North America, but Betancourt says changes in its temperature have followed periods of unusual wetness and severe drought in the West.

For much of the 20th century, the North Atlantic was cool, but twice it warmed up, once during the 1930s, when the Midwest suffered the Dust Bowl drought, and again during the 1950s, when drought struck much of the western United States.

Betancourt said the Atlantic's temperature can influence the path of the jet stream, the prevailing atmospheric currents that carry storms across the continent. When the North Atlantic goes warm, the jet stream buckles more, he said, channelling storms coming off the Pacific northward and allowing storm-blocking high pressure zones to sit over much of the West. Often when the West gets dry, the storms slide down from the Arctic into the Mid-Atlantic, as they did during the snowy winter of 2002-03.

While the Philadelphia region got wetter, the West got drier. All over the pine-scented mountains east of the Grand Canyon, the ponderosa and piñon trees are dying.

On the forested campus of Northern Arizona University, Tom De Gomez takes an ax to a dead tree, pulling away the bark to reveal how it died. Once the trees are weakened by drought, bark beetles attack, said De Gomez, an expert on forest health.

The beetles, a normal part of the environment, don't normally kill healthy trees, but the trees here are stressed, he said.

De Gomez has a 1910 picture of some sparse but large trees, taken before the area was logged. Back then there were just 20 to 40 trees per acre, but replanted trees grew in more densely so there are 160 to 1,000 per acre now.

"The tree densities we have right now are not a natural situation," he said. There are just too many trees and too little water. He predicts the ponderosa and piñon pines will simply vanish from some of the most drought-stressed hillsides, replaced by scrubbier and more drought-resistant junipers. That could mean death for birds and other animals that depend on the pines.

Some residents are thinning trees, hoping this will allow those remaining to survive. "It's like having too many people in a lifeboat," De Gomez said.

Something similar has happened to the population of human beings in California. "We have 37 million people here, though most of the state is in a semiarid environment," said Bill Patzert, a climate researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. All those people are creating an unprecedented demand for water.

Californians survived the 1950s' drought by pumping out millions of gallons of groundwater that was left behind by the last ice age - a resource as non-renewable as oil.

There's little agreement on how to react should the West enter decades of drought. Should California try to stem its inexorable growth? Stop irrigating the desert to grow food? What happens when all the groundwater gets pumped out?

Settlers have been remarkably successful in transforming the desert of the American West, wrote Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert, adding, "But the same could have been said about any number of desert civilizations throughout history - Assyria, Carthage, Mesopotamia, the Inca, the Aztec, the Hohokam - before they collapsed."

[Cheesesteak]

Californians survived the 1950s' drought by pumping out millions of gallons of groundwater that was left behind by the last ice age - a resource as non-renewable as oil.

There's little agreement on how to react should the West enter decades of drought. Should California try to stem its inexorable growth? Stop irrigating the desert to grow food? What happens when all the groundwater gets pumped out?

Settlers have been remarkably successful in transforming the desert of the American West, wrote Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert, adding, "But the same could have been said about any number of desert civilizations throughout history - Assyria, Carthage, Mesopotamia, the Inca, the Aztec, the Hohokam - before they collapsed."

[Cheesesteak]

"But the same could have been said about any number of desert civilizations throughout history - Assyria, Carthage, Mesopotamia, the Inca, the Aztec, the Hohokam, TCU Athletics in the MWC - before they collapsed."

[Eneg]

There must REALLY be a drought on the Hilltop if this is the best shot you can take at TCU! Hello!

[mrydel]

Keep practicing staying up late Geno...You'll need to in order to make it to the second half of your away games.

[PlanoStang]

Sounds like Foat Wuth will now be known as "Where the desert of the American West begins."

[EastStang]

Very soon, we'll be back to kicking the Frogs up and down the field. And the world's natural order will be restored. People will start being nicer to one another, terrorists will unilaterally disarm. Recessions will end. And world peace will be within our grasp. Phil Bennett will be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Peace for restoring the natural order of things and all will be right and just again.

[The PonyGrad]

So your point is that it is not going to happen?