By Chris Schnepf Foresters were among the first to start thinking about the possible effects of climate change, in part because of the long-term nature of forests—foresters commonly reflect on management issues on 50 or even 150-year time scales. Because forests are also highly valued for other benefits in addition to commodity production (i.e., wood), […]
By Chris Schnepf Trying to understand how climate is changing, and how these changes affect the crop yields, forest growth, water from melting snowpacks, and all the other parts of our natural world, is very challenging. Increasingly, some of the primary tools for understanding these phenomena are models. One of the biggest misconceptions about models […]
By Sonia A. Hall Turns out that understanding how changes in climate are affecting the demand for water for irrigation in the Columbia River Basin is really important for our overall understanding of how water use and management may need to change in the future. Check out this Washington State University newsletter article on a […]
By Sonia A. Hall The contrast between the arid west—rangelands, wheat, conifer forests, irrigated agriculture—and the Midwest’s Great Plains—corn, soybean, prairies—is well known. There is a somewhat abrupt line separating arid from humid, close to the 100th meridian. That line is now shifting, as climate change affects temperatures, precipitation, and wind patterns that control that […]
by Sonia A. Hall Yes, more on snow… because there’s less snow. Read Nathan Gilles’s article in the Climate CIRCulator, that discusses research that found that mountains in the western United States have seen snowpack decreasing by an amount similar to the size of Lake Mead over the last 60 years.
by Sonia A. Hall Remember 2015? That was a snow drought. Since then, researchers at CIRC (Climate Impacts Research Consortium) have been delving into snow droughts. They are part of an effort that recently released “a number of snow drought monitoring tools designed for decision makers and resource managers to monitor, plan for, and cope […]
By Lauren Parker California cultivates roughly two-thirds of the nation’s fruit and nut crops, including virtually 100% of the US almond supply. Growing demand and high profit-per-acre have driven a doubling in almond acreage in the Golden State since 1995, including a nearly 100,000-acre increase in almond plantations between 2011 and 2015, despite that period […]
by Sonia A. Hall Want to understand what carbon fertilization is, and what it could mean for the American West? Take a look at Linnia Hawkins’s (Oregon Climate Change Research Institute) post discussing research on whether the American West could become both drier and greener under climate change, which would affect wildfires. Linnia’s full article […]
by Sonia A. Hall Check out Meghan Dalton’s (Oregon Climate Change Research Institute) discussion of a published article about whether the 2015 “snow drought” is a harbinger of future climate changes. Read Meghan’s article in the Climate CIRCulator.
By Sonia A. Hall One challenge I struggle with when sharing research focused at global scales is how to tease out answers to questions that are meaningful in the region and at the scale I work in. My approach is to focus on how the big picture results sketch out, and think about what it […]
