Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous If you’ve walked through the forest on a rainy day and noticed that it’s drier under the trees, you’ve experienced interception. In hydrology, interception is when water gets hung up on vegetative leaves, needles, or branches and never makes it to the ground. The precipitation gets …
In January, I launched the #365climateimpacts project, in which I’ll spend a year tweeting stories of the many ways climate change is impacting people, ecosystems, and the earth; ideas for how to communicate about climate change more effectively; and analyses of technologies and policy proposals that show promise for combatting …
From a distance, Anne has been watching an incredibly unusual summer play out in the Pacific Northwest, following a winter with far less snow (but more rain) than usual. Folks on the ground in Oregon have been collecting data on the response of the Oregon Cascades streams to “no snow, …
This work is being conducted by undergraduate lab member, Allison Reynolds. Allison presented her work as part of the CUAHSI/USGS Virtual Workshop on applications of laser specs to hydrology and biogeochemistry. From that workshop, she will have an extended abstract published in a USGS open file report, and her poster …
Jefferson, A. 2011. Seasonal versus transient snow and the elevation dependence of climate sensitivity in maritime mountainous regions, Geophysical Research Letters, 38, L16402, doi:10.1029/2011GL048346. Abstract: In maritime mountainous regions, the phase of winter precipitation is elevation dependent, and in watersheds receiving both rain and snow, hydrologic impacts of climate change …
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous Even though we all think of the freezing point of water as 0 °C, very pure water remains a liquid until about -40 °C. Water crystallizes to ice in the presence of tiny nucleation particles in the atmosphere. These particles can be sea spray, soot, dust …
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous When water infiltrates past the ground surface and begins to percolate through the soil’s unsaturated zone, it doesn’t move downward like an even sheet. Instead, fast fingers of water move downward along pores, roots and other places where flow is easier than through the soil matrix, …
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous The geo-image bonanza of this month’s Accretionary Wedge gives me a good reason to make good on a promise I made a few months ago. I promised to write about what can happen on the flanks of Pacific Northwest volcanoes when a warm, heavy rainfall hits …
The National Weather Service has produced a pretty map of snowfall totals from the storm a few weeks ago. Mecklenburg County (Charlotte) got around 4″, which is a hair more than I measured at home on Monday morning (~3.5″ plus an ice layer). At our field site in Gaston County, …