By Sonia A. Hall It is not always easy to extract regionally-relevant conclusions from global studies, such as the one discussed in the August 2020 CIRCulator article “Irrigated Agriculture, Snowmelt, and Climate Change.” So though many of the irrigation-dependent crops studied are not typical to the Pacific Northwest, this article discusses research that synthesizes key […]
By Sonia A. Hall In response to the recent—and in California, ongoing—megafires, many have been asking whether the cause is climate change or forest management. Erin Hanan wrote a blog article arguing that this is not the right question, because in many cases both contribute to what is happening. The drivers of fire activity are […]
By Patrick Shults, Washington State University Extension The coastal Pacific Northwest is home to some of the best tree-growing conditions in the world. Fertile soils, plenty of rain, mild temperatures, and short dry seasons allow trees to pack on solid growth each year. These conditions also give them a significant advantage in protecting themselves from […]
By Mengqi Zhao, recent PhD graduate, Washington State University For more than fifty years, individuals and organizations in the Yakima River Basin (YRB) have been working toward improving water availability, especially for agriculture. The mismatch between rainfall (and snowmelt) timing and the irrigation season has focused these efforts on strategies for increasing water storage. However, […]
By Chris Schnepf When it comes to climate change, many people focus on raw physics: how much more precipitation or less, the number of frost free days, how many days a year above or below certain temperatures, the length of the fire season, etc. These dimensions are all important to reflect on and study, but […]
By Sonia A. Hall Pacific Northwesterners, especially those of us living and breathing in the inland Northwest, expect wildfires every summer. It’s not about if, but about when, where, and how severe they will be, both in forest and rangeland landscapes. As with many other aspects of natural resource management, climate change continues to add […]
By Paris Edwards, USDA Northwest Climate Hub Water systems across the Northwest sustain crops, livestock, ecosystems, people and power production. These highly managed, interconnected networks of rivers, reservoirs, canals, and pipelines are economic mainstays for the region, and play a foundational role in food and energy security and sustaining natural resource livelihoods. However, climate change […]
