US Drought Conditions mid-June 2012: 69% in West, 57% in Southeast

The record warmth of the past six months in the US was more than just a set of numbers or a temporarily interesting headline.  Along with the heat, precipitation for most of the southern half of the country has been below average in the past few months.  The result?  At least some level of drought conditions exists today across the Western US, with a significant portion of the Southwest (CO, NM, AZ, NV) experiencing Severe drought:

Figure 1. Drought conditions over the West US for the week ending 12 June 2012.

As you can probably tell from Figure 1, the Pacific Northwest had below average temperatures and above average precipitation during the same time period, thus the relative lack of drought in OR, WA, ID & MT.

Interestingly, the areas experiencing the most severe level of drought are also those with the largest wildfires: the High Park fire in my state and the Little Bear and the Whitewater-Baldy Complex (at 289,478-acres as of yesterday!) fires in New Mexico.  An additional link to climate change here: the High Park fire is burning in an area that the the pine beetle epidemic has devastated.  The epidemic has left over 3.3 million acres of forest in just Colorado with dead trees.  The beetles’ population have exploded in the past 20 years as winter nighttime lows warmed enough to allow more larvae to survive the coldest months of the year.  This epidemic will transform the inter-mountain West.  Combined with the extensive drought, millions more acres of trees will succumb to the epidemic.

Meanwhile, the Southeast finally got some relief in the past week and a half due to very heavy rainfall.  The result is clear in the table below: the percent area experiencing drought has dropped significantly, from over 75% three months ago to 57% this week.  Unfortunately, the areas with the worst drought conditions didn’t get their long-term drought busted, especially Georgia.  This area typically receives some relief from drought during the Atlantic tropical storm season.  The Atlantic has been quiet for the past few weeks, however.  The Southeast will have to wait a bit longer for additional relief.

Figure 2. Drought conditions over the Southwest US for the week ending 12 June 2012.

Drought has been present across GA for the better part of a year now.  The area affected by drought has expanded to neighboring states during the end of the winter and beginning of spring, then shifted in the last month due to weather systems moving through.

There’s no crisis to speak of yet, but inhabitants as well as policymakers should monitor conditions as the year progresses.  These conditions are not a result of climate change in any direct way.  They are simply a result of a chain of events, some of which (e.g. Arctic ice loss in recent years) are more directly related to climate change than others.

2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit News 12/9/09: 2000s Hottest Decade On Record

Lots of activity in Copenhagen happened during the past two days.  As expected, results in the form of agreements or pacts haven’t come yet – that will happen next week.  So here are some more climate-related news items to digest while negotiators do their job.  I’ll add them throughout the day as they come out.

The 2000′s will be the hottest decade on record.  Read that again: the 2000′s will be the hottest decade on record.  Both the World Meteorological Organization and NOAA have come out with separate but agreeing analyses on this topic.  Expect NASA to say the same thing when they release their update in the next week.  We’ll have to wait until a little while into 2010 to get additional confirmation, but climate change is occurring today, period, end of story.  What’s left to debate and decide?  How fast and how much we act in the next 5 years.  After that, it becomes how do we react, because a great deal of change will have been locked into the climate system.

Four-Corners Tree Die-Off Tied To Global Climate Change Drought

This post will cover a lot of ground.  I’m writing it having just read a PNAS paper from 2005 about a massive vegetation die-off event being tied to global climate change-type drought in the four-corner states.  I have been thinking that such a study should be done as I read and learned about the various pine beetle epidemics afflicting Western North America.  The paper, “Regional vegetation die-off in response to global-change-type drought“  contains the kind of information that is critical in piecing a number of different threads together to weave a coherent story.  The results contained within the paper, which can also be seen at this PNAS website,  provide a profound message about the impacts of climate change.  Such impacts have already occurred.  As I’ve written recently (here and here, for example), they are growing in number and intensity.  We ignore them at our (and the Earth’s) peril.

A series of big messages I got from this paper can be summed up as follows.  With human-forced climate change, warmer droughts are predicted to occur more often.  One such drought has already occurred (and could be continuing to occur) in the southwestern U.S.  That drought has had a profound impact on a large region’s worth of vegetation.  That impact came in two waves: the drought weakened the vegetation which then fell to the beetle epidemic.  The beetles were able to spread due to the warmth that characterized this drought.  With this and other region-wide die-offs, the potential for large changes in carbon stores is real we will face with their consequences.  As a result, carbon-related policies must be prepared to take such die-offs (and their after-effects)  into account.  The failure of region-wide ecosystems, a disaster on its own, would also present a real danger to our society.

The paper identifies regional-scale mortality of overstory trees.  Such events alter ecosystems and land surface properties for decades.  Greenhouse forcings are expected to amplify the periodic, cooler droughts found in previous climate regimes.  The drought that has occurred across the southwest since 2000 offers evidence about how those forcings manifest.  [On a short tangent, the widespread, severe drought in Australia provide additional evidence.]  This paper focused on a Piñon pine die-off.  Additional trees act as overstory species across the four states studied.  At this time, I’m not aware of similar studies detailing the greenhouse-forcing-drought-beetle-die-off relationship as it relates to those species.  It is something I will look for after writing this.

There is one figure in this paper that I want to draw particular attention to:

This figure shows annual average temperatures and precipitation values for all the stations included in the study.  The yellow-shaded vertical bands point out two regional-scale droughts – the first in the 1950s and the second in the early 2000s.  In particular, I want to draw attention to the rise in average annual temperatures from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s (top panel): from ~10.7C to 12.3C.  Combined with the corresponding drop in precipitation from 380mm to ~250mm, this is what the authors have characterized as a global-change-type drought.  It contrasts with the 1950s drought by being statistically warmer to a significant level.  The bottom two panels also deserve some attention.  Two of the last four years in the study exhibited maximum average annual temperatures at the 90th percentile (panel c).  Three of the last four years in the study exhibited minimum average annual temperatures well above the 10th percentile (panel d).  That information isn’t available from the top panel

The reason I draw attention to the temperature rise in particular is the warning it provides about anticipated future warming across the region as the climate continues to respond to greenhouse forcing.  Under scenarios now considered likely with the “warming in the pipeline”, temperatures across this region are expected to rise another 2-10C.  As I wrote above, this paper demonstrates the impacts that warming has on dominant vegetation types: water stressing the plants and allowing bark beetle infestations to spread unabated.  With even more warming, what effects will ecosystems in the region experience?  I’ve written before about the bark beetle problem affecting the higher elevations of Colorado and other regions across the Rocky Mountains (see list below).  Those trees were impacted in a similar fashion that the Piñon trees were in this study.  How many additional species will be stressed to the point that they will also experience region-wide die-offs?  Under those same climate change scenarios, annual precipitation is expected to continue to decrease.  That decrease will be for all purposes permanent as far as humans are concerned.  Desert-level precipiation amounts are quite possible for hundreds of years.

Now look at the graph more closely.  We’ve seen the devastating effects just a small quantitative amount of warming has already had.  That’s one of the real dangers of climate change: ecosystems are quite used to the climate of the 20th century (in a larger sense, that of the past few thousand years).  There is no way of accurately foretelling how those ecosystems will respond to a significantly different climate, which we might already have entered into.  The die-offs I’ve seen and read about; the shifting climate and ecosystems zones I’ve seen evidence of tell me that the climate at the end of the 21st century could be quite different than the one of the 20th century.

Expanding on this a bit: at what stage would prairie grass die-off?  I can hear the denialist line about tree die-off and small animal die-off not being a big deal and not indicative of climate change.  The level of tree die-off discussed in this paper was unprecedented in scope: all ages, all sizes were affected.  Beyond that though, I wanted to come up with a scenario that would provide more visceral evidence of climate change impacts on human society.  If grass or hay or the like experienced a regional die-off due to an expanding, long-term warm drought, what would we do?  If cattle started dying by the millions due to water stress and epidemics, would more people take notice?  I have to think so.  I hope it doesn’t get to that level, but it might before we all aggressively look for greenhouse forcing solutions.

One additional question I have is what story does the post-2004 data tell?  I will look for additional, related studies to this one to fill out the scene.  It was somewhat surprising that this study was published in 2005 .  Nobody I’ve spoken to about the ponderosa pine die-off was aware of this paper – which is part of the reason I’m writing about it.  If anyone is aware of such a study, I’m all ears.  Otherwise, I’ll write something up on whatever I find.

Cross-posted at SquareState.
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Here is a list of some of the bark beetle epidemic posts I’ve written:

Western Forests Could Become Carbon Source, Not Sink

2008 Pine Beetle Kill: 400,000 acres in CO

Healthy Forests/Vibrant Communities Act of 2009

Wilderness Society’s Aerial Investigation of CO Pine Beetle Kill

Beetle Killed Trees May Be Allowed to Burn

Battling the Mountain Pine Beetles

Catastrophic beetle kill in Colorado

2008 Pine Beetle Kill: 400,000 acres in CO

The mountain pine beetles continued to spread through Colorado forests in 2008. The numbers are bleak: 400,000 acres succumbed to the beetles last year. That adds to the 1.5 million acres affected by the beetles in the past 10 years or so. Most of those acres were attacked by the beetles in the past few years as a medium-term drought and warmer winter nights have made their influence felt over the state and region.

The area where the beetles moved through in 2008 shifted from years past to the Front Range.  Their effects will be more visible to larger number of Coloradans.  I’ve seen the dead trees they leave behind from roads through the Rocky Mountains and from the air, thanks to a flight set up by the Wilderness Society during the DNC in August 2008.  It is widespread and it continues to grow.  Colorado, after all, is only one state affected by differing species of beetles.  The remainder of the Rocky Mountains also suffer from the beetle epidemic, from Mexico through Canada.  The RMN article doesn’t include numbers from other states or provinces.  Once I locate them, I’ll make note of them.

Two pellet mills are now operating in Kremmling and Walden.  They buy trees that can’t be otherwise salvaged.  Lumber from dead trees is also showing up for sale in a growing number of places (thanks to efforts by people like Sen. Dan Gibbs).  The Forest Service and local municipalities are trying to educate the public about the dangers of the millions of acres of dead trees.  Gov. Ritter formed his Forest Health Council almost a year ago, as he works to keep up to date with the issue.  His efforts led to the introduction of the Healthy Forests/Vibrant Communities Act of 2009.

Colorado hasn’t seen a bad wildfire season in a number of years, which is both good and bad.  It’s good because it has allowed for the removal of a large number of trees around human populated areas.  It’s bad because the extent of dead trees continues to grow – setting the stage for potentially catastrophic wildfires in the future.  If there is a series of dry thunderstorms one summer, a lot of acres are going to burn.

$13 million in federal funds is expected to find its way to Colorado this year.  That’s more than the $8 million made available last year.  It’s less than the $20 million needed by agencies to help alleviate some of the threat.  I will note that there were a couple of bills in the U.S Congress last year that were written to help deal with maintaining our forests’ health.  Neither of them moved out of committee, despite being written by Dem. Rep. Mark Udall in a Democratic-led Congress.  I realize there are plenty of things on Congress’ plate, but this is simply an issue that can’t be shuttled to the side for very long.  Tomorrow’s costs due to today’s inaction grow exponentially with each passing year (wildfire and climate change both apply).

Climate change is already changing the planet.  The beetle epidemic is but one manifestation of it.  Unfortunately, the infestation is one of the things that climatologists couldn’t predict on their own.  Coordination between climatologists, biologists and many other kinds of specialists is needed to communicate the eventual effects climate change will have on the planet.  As we move forward, those efforts need to be made so that their cost to our society can be appropriately tallied and dealt with.

Climate Change: Core Climate Solutions, Greenland Ice Loss, CO Forest Health

Climate Progress has a Core Climate Solution Primer.  Recommended reading.

The rate at which Greenland’s ice sheets are losing mass has dramatically increased compared to rates in the 20th century, according to a new Geophysical Research Letters article.  From the abstract:

We find that the ice sheet was losing 110 ± 70 Gt/yr in the 1960s, 30 ± 50 Gt/yr or near balance in the 1970s–1980s, and 97 ± 47 Gt/yr in 1996 increasing rapidly to 267 ± 38 Gt/yr in 2007.

The 2007 number is just astounding.  Quantifying it is important for other research.

Gov. Bill Ritter has sent a letter to the Chief of the U.S. Forest Service requesting a larger portion of an upcoming federal allotment of forest health funding.  Citing Colorado’s ongoing drought and recent record fire years coupled with an expected explosion of human-forest interfaces in the next 20 years, Ritter made the argument that the current average of $6 million per year in funding wasn’t sufficient.  From his letter:

Regional Forester Rick Cables estimated the costs of addressing these concerns on national forests to be nearly $40 million dollars in fiscal year 2009 alone – a calculation that does not include any support to address equally critical needs on state and private lands.

More below.