Above: Most of the western U.S. is suffering from some degree of drought. The darkest color on this map represents the most extreme category of drought in NOAA's classification scheme. Click on the image for a larger version with legend. Image courtesy
National Drought Mitigation Center.

Arizona's shrinking lake provides a stark warning to America's thirsty west

Dan Glaister in Lake Powell, Arizona
Monday October 11, 2004
The Guardian

An unexpected sight greets the holidaymaker out for a gentle cruise on the 186-mile Lake Powell in Arizona. A mile or so upriver from the Glen Canyon dam stand red and green channel markers to guide those on the water. But the signs planted in the riverbank are of little use today: thanks to a drought which is entering its sixth year, the lake's water level has dropped by 40 metres (130ft), leaving the signs on each bank stranded at the top of a cliff.

Steve Ward, who works for a tourism company, steers his motorboat into a bay and points to an island across the sparkling blue water. "Normally we'd go across there to leave the bay," he says, "Right now we can't, because there's land in the way."

That land, like the many newly emerged beaches dotted around the lake, would normally be under 30 metres of water.

Lake Powell, the second largest reservoir in the US, which fills the canyons straddling the border between Utah and Arizona, is an important link in the chain of water supply drawn from the Colorado river. So the falling water levels are not just a story of a tourist attraction facing tough times, but an environmental problem that may have a fundamental impact on life in seven of the states of the western US, notably the thirsty states of California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.

That supply keeps agriculture in the south-west of the US irrigated, provides for the needs of industry, keeps lawns sprinkled and green, and enables people to wash their cars and themselves. Without the water from the Colorado river most of the west would revert to its natural state: a desert.

This year the drought has hit home, causing alarm among the community of scientists, technicians and bureaucrats whose job it is to slake the thirst of the west.

"If the drought continues it will force the states to sit down and take some truly tough decisions," says Ken Rice, the manager of the dam, who works for the government's bureau of reclamation. "It really depends on what mother nature does over the next few years."

The threat of the drought is made tangible by the declining lake levels. Further down the Colorado river near Las Vegas, at Lake Mead - the biggest reservoir in the US, created by the Hoover dam - the remains of a once submerged village are starting to emerge.

At Lake Powell, the "bathtub ring", a white mark left on the orange sandstone of the canyon by the receding lake, provides a jarring reminder of where the water should be, and a handy indicator that the lake is just 38% full, with a level of 1,088 metres.

When the lake drops to 1,064 metres, it will have reached the minimum level at which the two power stations that use its water can operate safely, and the lake will effectively be decomissioned.

Pictures of the Lake Powell Lodge at Wahweap - literally "bitter water", the lake's largest resort - show it perched on the shore, water lapping at its foundations. Today it is a third of a mile from the water's edge.

The concrete launch ramp built to enable the thousands of holidaymakers who come to Wahweap each year to put their houseboats, dinghies, speedboats and jetskis on to the lake stops about 10 metres short of the water. It has been extended twice in the past year, and in August a system of welded steel tubes was laid into the water to provide additional access. The total cost of bringing the tourists back to the water's edge at Wahweap has been $5m (£2.8m).

But with the level of the lake falling by 53cm (20in) a week, unless there is significant rainfall between now and the spring, and unless the snowmelt that contributes most of the water increases on recent years, the ramp will have to be extended again for next year.

"We've been releasing more water than has been coming in, due to our legal obligations," says Mr Rice, turning to look out of his office window on top of the dam.

The legal obligations explain why the drought could have a profound impact on the way water is used as far away as California.

The Colorado river is the subject of a complex series of contracts and compacts dating back to 1922. Known as the law of the river, they establish a hierarchy of demand on the Colorado's water, with California having the greatest say.

Should the water start to dry up and real cuts in supply be made, other states will lose their supply before California, which receives some 14% of its water from the river. Water trading and legal fees are the most likely outcome of any attempt to implement the law of the river.

"Our role is to make the states understand that if they don't get their act together, we will step in," says Bennett Raley, assistant secretary for water and science at the US interior department, which oversees the bureau of reclamation.

Mr Raley, who has been going to water meetings since he was 11, says the drought should make people change the way they think about and use water, and that farming in the west should look both at its practices and at its choice of crops.

"People say that the west has obviously grown out of its water supply and must stop growing," he says. "That's reasonable on the face of it, but not true. The issue in time of drought is what will be the relationship between irrigated agriculture and the cities. The secretary of the interior does not have the legal authority to say, 'Needs have changed, we're going to reallocate water from agriculture to urban use.' The view of this administration is that the market is the best way to make those changes."

But some argue that the reservoir should simply be allowed to drain away. "Glen Canyon dam and Lake Powell are unnecessary and counterproductive for the water needs of the west," says Chris Peterson of the Glen Canyon Institute.

"They've destroyed one of the most beautiful places in the world. We're in a water management crisis. We're dealing with a system that is 50 years old. It's like a 57 Chevy.

"Since that time, America has started to appreciate its wildlife, and we've also realised that there are better ways of storing water. We live in a desert. There's plenty of water - the question is who gets it and how is it stored."

He predicts that if the drought continues (and some say that it is not a drought, but a return to normal conditions after a 50-year wet period), any attempt to enact the law of the river will become mired in litigation.

Mr Ward starts to climb the steep slope from the water's edge to the latest temporary car park. "I choose to be optimistic and tell people there's things we haven't seen for 30 years, come and see them before they're covered up," he says.

"I don't consider this drought to be a danger to Lake Powell as much as it is to the west of America. If this is a 30-year drought, things are going to have to change all over America."

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U.N. SAYS GLOBE DRYING UP AT FAST PACE
By CHRIS HAWLEY
Associated press
June 15, 2004

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040615/D837O6TO0.html

UNITED NATIONS - The world is turning to dust, with lands the size of Rhode Island becoming desert wasteland every year and the problem threatening to send millions of people fleeing to greener countries, the United Nations says.

One-third of the Earth's surface is at risk, driving people into cities and destroying agriculture in vast swaths of Africa. Thirty-one percent of Spain is threatened, while China has lost 36,000 square miles to desert -- an area the size of Indiana -- since the 1950s.

This week the United Nations marks the 10th anniversary of the Convention to Combat Desertification, a plan aimed at stopping the phenomenon. Despite the efforts, the trend seems to be picking up speed -- doubling its pace since the 1970s.

"It's a creeping catastrophe," said Michel Smitall, a spokesman for the U.N. secretariat that oversees the 1994 accord. "Entire parts of the world might become uninhabitable."

Slash-and-burn agriculture, sloppy conservation, overtaxed water supplies and soaring populations are mostly to blame. But global warming is taking its toll, too.

The United Nations is holding a ceremony in Bonn, Germany, on Thursday to mark World Day to Combat Desertification, and will hold a meeting in Brazil this month to take stock of the problem.

The warning comes as a controversial movie, "The Day After Tomorrow" is whipping up interest in climate change, and as rivers and lakes dry up in the American West, giving Americans a taste of what's to come elsewhere.

The United Nations says:

- From the mid-1990s to 2000, 1,374 square miles have turned into deserts each year -- an area about the size of Rhode Island. That's up from 840 square miles in the 1980s, and 624 square miles during the 1970s.

- By 2025, two-thirds of arable land in Africa will disappear, along with one-third of Asia's and one-fifth of South America's.

- Some 135 million people -- equivalent to the populations of France and Germany combined -- are at risk of being displaced.

Most at risk are dry regions on the edges of deserts -- places like sub-Saharan Africa or the Gobi Desert in China, where people are already struggling to eke out a living from the land.

As populations expand, those regions have become more stressed. Trees are cut for firewood, grasslands are overgrazed, fields are over-farmed and lose their nutrients, water becomes scarcer and dirtier.

Technology can make the problem worse. In parts of Australia, irrigation systems are pumping up salty water and slowly poisoning farms. In Saudi Arabia, herdsmen can use water trucks instead of taking their animals from oasis to oasis -- but by staying in one place, the herds are getting bigger and eating all the grass.

In Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, coastal resorts are swallowing up water that once moistened the wilderness. Many farmers in those countries still flood their fields instead of using more miserly "drip irrigation," and the resulting shortages are slowly baking the life out of the land.

The result is a patchy "rash" of dead areas, rather than an easy-to-see expansion of existing deserts, scientists say. These areas have their good times and bad times as the weather changes. But in general, they are getting bigger and worse-off.

"It's not as dramatic as a flood or a big disaster like an earthquake," said Richard Thomas of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas in Aleppo, Syria. "There are some bright spots and hot spots. But overall, there is a trend toward increasing degradation."

The trend is speeding up, but it has been going on for centuries, scientists say. Fossilized pollen and seeds, along with ancient tools like grinding stones, show that much of the Middle East, the Mediterranean and North Africa were once green. The Sahara itself was a savanna, and rock paintings show giraffes, elephants and cows once lived there.

Global warming contributes to the problem, making many dry areas drier, scientists say. In the last century, average temperatures have risen over 1 degree Fahrenheit worldwide, according to the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

As for the American Southwest, it is too early to tell whether its six-year drought could turn to something more permanent. But scientists note that reservoir levels are dropping as cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas expand.

"In some respects you may have greener vegetation showing up in people's yards, but you may be using water that was destined for the natural environment," said Stuart Marsh of the University of Arizona's Office of Arid Lands Studies. "That might have an effect on the biodiversity surrounding that city."

The Global Change Research Program says global warming could eventually make the Southwest wetter -- but it will also cause more extreme weather, meaning harsher droughts that could kill vegetation. Now, the Southwest drought has become so severe that even the sagebrush is dying.

"The lack of water and the overuse of water, that is going to be a threat to the United States," Thomas said. "In other parts of the world, the problem is poverty that causes people to overuse the land. Most of these ecological systems have tipping points, and once you go past them, things go downhill."

...........

Related Websites:

United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification:
http://www.unccd.int

International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas:
http://www.icarda.org/

University of Arizona Office of Arid Lands Studies:
http://ag.arizona.edu/OALS/oals/oals.html

Why so Dry?

The western U.S. is facing yet another summer of severe drought. Science provides some answers -- and some baffling questions.

May 21, 2004: People often greet the first warm days of summer with eager anticipation for the sunny weather to come. But for many people in the western U.S., the arrival of warm weather this year is an harbinger of hard times ahead.

Drought has gripped some parts of the West for as many as seven consecutive years, causing one of the worst dry spells in decades. Soils are dry; reservoirs are low. Farmers and golf course managers are vying for irrigation water, residents face water rationing measures, and the politics of water "seniority" rights is heating up between cities and between states.

Right: Lake Mead, an important water source in the West created in the 1930s by the construction of Hoover Dam, is approaching record low levels--hence the "bathtub ring" around the lake, shown here. Image courtesy US National Park Service. [More]

Hope for a reprieve fades with the departing winter, because little precipitation typically falls in the West during summer months. These regions depend on winter storms to stock the mountains with snow, which melts in summer and replenishes water supplies. The snow pack in April 2004, though, was only 40% to 75% of normal

The ongoing drought, which has affected 20% to 50% of the land area of the contiguous United States, isn't as bad as, say, the Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s. Then 70% of the U.S. was dry. In the Great Plains, precious topsoil blew away, agriculture collapsed, farmers literally lost their land. "The dispossessed were drawn west," wrote John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. "Families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry. They streamed over the mountains--restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do--to lift, to push, to pull, to cut-- anything, any burden to bear, for food."

What causes such severe droughts? Are they predictable? Scientists aren't sure, but they're learning by studying the current dry spell. Earth-orbiting satellites, which didn't exist during the Dust Bowl years, now provide crucial data about winds, rain, soil moisture, and the state of the oceans. Somewhere among those numbers lies the answer.

A key factor is the temperature of water in the Pacific Ocean, says Bob Oglesby, a climate dynamicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the Pacific alter the course of the jet stream as it flows eastward over North America. This high-altitude "river" of fast-moving air is like a conveyor belt for storms, so the path it takes across the continent has a strong effect on where rain and snow will fall. By steering the jet stream, the Pacific Ocean acts like a baton-wielding orchestra conductor directing the symphony of weather patterns across North America.

For example, a strong "El Niño" pattern of warm Pacific surface waters near the equator will drive storms into California, while the opposite "La Niña" pattern steers moisture-bearing storms further north to Washington state and Canada. One causes drought, the other alleviates it. But there must be more to the story: While a mild La Niña lurked in the Pacific during the onset of the current drought--as would be expected--a shift to a weak El Niño in 2003 did not reverse the drought.

Sea surface temperature patterns corresponding to El Niño and La Niña. Red/white denotes warmer water; purple denotes cooler. The heat content of the water was calculated from TOPEX/Poseidon satellite measurements of the water's height. [More]

"It's a really active area of research right now as people are trying to decipher exactly what's causing what," Oglesby says. He and his colleagues at the Global Hydrology and Climate Center are among those working to understand what's going on. In particular, Oglesby is investigating how the land and atmosphere interact with each other during a drought, focusing on the roles that snow cover and soil moisture play.

Part of the difficultly in understanding drought lies in the fact that weather involves many feedback loops that complicate its behavior and defeat simple cause-and-effect explanations. Soil moisture creates such a feedback loop during dry weather. Oglesby explains:

"Once you get into a dry pattern and you start to dry the ground out, that reduction in soil moisture can help to intensify and perpetuate the drought." Normally, the evaporation of soil moisture consumes much of the energy contained in the summer sunshine; without this moisture, that energy heats the ground instead and raises temperatures even further. Warmer temperatures create a high pressure system which, in turn, blocks storms from coming into the area. Drought begets drought.

Drought is a natural part of cyclical weather patterns in North America, notes Oglesby. Physical clues about ancient weather, such as tree rings and lake sediment cores, show that dry spells such as the Dust Bowl and a similar drought in the 1950s typically occur a few times per century. The historical record also reveals a "mega-drought," longer and more severe than any recent episodes, 500 or so years ago.

NASA climate dynamicist is Bob Oglesby.

In modern times "there's more to drought than simple lack of precipitation," adds Roger Pielke Sr., a state climatologist for Colorado and a professor of atmospheric sciences at Colorado State University. "You have to consider human factors like the amount of water being drained from rivers for crop irrigation and drinking water. In absolute terms, the ongoing dry spell is not yet as severe as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, but the impacts have been relatively severe because the demands that people place on the water supply are so much greater now than they were back then."

This makes a complicated situation even more complicated. Land-use and water-use by humans; large-scale atmospheric circulation changes caused by ocean temperatures; feedbacks between the land and atmosphere: they all play a role. Climatologists can't yet put these factors together to predict what will happen many years in advance. Next winter is mystery enough. Will it bring much snow ... and relief? No one knows.

One thing seems sure, though: With levels of moisture in the soil and snow on the mountains both below average, people in the western U.S. are facing at least one more long, dry summer.

Credits & Contacts
Authors: Patrick L. Barry, Dr. Tony Phillips
Responsible NASA official: Ron Koczor

THE LARDER IS ALMOST BARE

After four consecutive meagre harvests, the result of heat waves, droughts and pestilence,the world's stockpile of grain is perilously low. Is it a harbinger of 'gastronomical Armageddon?' MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT reports

Saturday, May 22, 2004

Each year around this time, farmers across the breadbaskets of the Northern Hemisphere hop on their tractors and drive out to their fields, full of hope for the new season's grain crop. For the past four years, their efforts haven't been too successful.

It has been an almost unprecedented run of misfortune: four back-to-back meagre harvests, as heat waves, drought and pestilence took their toll -- something that hasn't happened since at least 1960.

As a result, since the turn of the millennium, the amount of grain held in the world's stockpiles has been falling. At the end of the 2003 harvest, the amount of wheat, corn, rice and other grains had fallen to about 280 million tonnes. In 1999, it was more than 500 million.

That seems like a lot of grain because bakers can make about 2,000 loaves for every tonne of wheat milled into flour. But considering that the grain has to support both the world's human population and its billions of livestock, there is precious little to go around.

Measured against consumption, there is enough grain left in the planetary larder to last for only 59 days, one of the lower figures on record. After it is used up, people will go hungry if the next harvest fails.

The string of bad harvests hasn't attracted widespread attention yet, but it has the almost undivided attention of Lester Brown, one of the more thoughtful -- and controversial -- environmentalists in the United States. The founder of the influential Worldwatch Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., believes that the line of bad harvests is no fluke of nature, but rather a harbinger of what one writer has termed "gastronomical Armageddon" -- a chaotic and protracted period of food shortages triggered by the world's environmental plagues, including global warming and water shortages.

Environmentalists have long fretted about such things as clear-cutting, species extinction, rain-forest destruction and melting ice caps. But, as important as these issues may be, Mr. Brown thinks that the biggest flashpoint for environment problems is on the world's farms.

The shrinkage of the food supply will be where environmental degradation will have a huge impact on people, he says. "Rising food prices may be the first global economic indicator to signal serious trouble in the relationship between us and the Earth's natural systems and resources," he says.

Mr. Brown thinks that some sort of food crisis is almost inevitable because the magnitude of the exhaustion of grain stockpiles has been staggering. It's equal to about five years of the entire grain output of Canada, one of the top agricultural exporters.

The harvest shortfalls have become so immense, he says, it would take superlative crops in prime agricultural regions this year and next to even begin to start refilling the larder. "I think the chances of farmers digging their way out of this hole are less than one in 10."

Mr. Brown believes that three main environmental trends are threatening to show up, like an unwelcome guest, at humanity's dinner table: global warming, water shortages in many parts of the world and farmland degradation in China.

He details his case in his latest book, Plan B, Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble.

Not everyone buys Mr. Brown's foreboding projections, of course. He has been criticized, usually by conservatives, for being a modern Malthusian, a reference to 19th-century British economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus believed that humans faced imminent famine about 200 years ago because population growth would outstrip the agricultural capacity of the land. His prediction didn't come to pass -- at least not yet -- because rising agricultural yields have always outpaced population growth.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is optimistic that grain stockpiles can be rebuilt from their current nadir. In a forecast issued last month, the Rome-based FAO said it expects an above-average harvest this year "that could help alleviate the tight global supply situation."

Yet Mr. Brown's ideas are making waves among environmentalists and others.

In the United States, media magnate Ted Turner came upon his new book and thought its worrisome content was so persuasive that he bought more than 3,000 copies for distribution to people he knows. Mr. Brown has been on a busy lecture circuit since the book's publication last year, making the case for imminent food shortages to large audiences.

Global warming could be such a threat to food supplies because of the pernicious impact that searing summer temperatures have on the ability of plants to fertilize their seeds, cutting crop yields. Although it is scary to contemplate, new research shows that it wouldn't take much warming from current summer high temperatures to cause almost complete crop failures.

The research, based on tests in the tropics where hot weather is common, shows that as temperatures rise above 30 degrees when plants flower, the yields of rice, wheat and corn -- the staples of the human diet -- begin to fall. Although it doesn't work exactly the same way for all crops, there is a drop of about 10 per cent in yield for every one-degree increase.

Readings above 30 degrees amount to a hot summer day in most areas of southern Canada, and are experienced only occasionally. But the same could have been said of Europe -- until last year. Much of Europe's grain belt had a sneak preview of what warming can do as temperatures soared above the thermal optimum for plant growth over wide areas.

"Those off-the-chart temperatures in Europe, the ones that took 35,000 lives in nine countries, those temperatures shrunk harvests in every country from France east to Ukraine," Mr. Brown says.

His thinking has also been influenced by a refinement of the temperature research that has been conducted at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. Scientists there have found that the fertilization of rice seeds falls from 100 per cent at 34 degrees to near zero at 40 degrees.

Rising temperatures may be one reason that world grain harvests have either fallen, or stagnated for the past eight years.

After temperatures, water is a second crucial element for successful plant growth.

Many countries, including the United States, India and China, irrigate using groundwater and are pumping unsustainable amounts to quench the thirst of their crops. The result is depleting aquifers, and eventually, an agricultural system that will be short of water when the resource is mined out. In North America, the big worry is over water levels in the once mighty Ogallala aquifer under the U.S. Great Plains, the world's bread basket.

"When you realize that more than half the world's people live in countries where water tables are already falling, you can begin to see how literally explosive this water issue can be," Mr. Brown says.

Droughts have also emerged as a big problem. Canada's Prairies has been exceedingly dry for years. In 2002, high temperatures and lack of rain hit India, the United States and Canada simultaneously. Last year, it was Europe's turn in the rotisserie.

The other big influence on global food supplies has been China, where grain production has been in a steep fall for the past five years. The 2003 harvest was nearly 20 per cent below the 1998 crop, a shortfall of 60 million tonnes, a drop larger than Canada's entire annual grain output.

Mr. Brown attributes the Chinese decline to a number of factors. Productive agricultural land is being lost to factories and roads, for one thing, as the country undergoes its rapid industrialization. He said providing for China's new cars has alone chewed up the same amount of land as 100,000 U.S.-sized football fields.

Another problem is that Chinese deserts are expanding, in part because of overgrazing, further cutting into its agricultural land.

Mr. Brown thinks that the drop in Chinese grain production will soon cause the country to enter world food markets in a big way, driving up prices in much the same way that the Soviets did in the early 1970s when they cornered the U.S. grain supply.

Dire warnings of imminent global food shortages should be welcome news in Canada's long suffering farm belt. Years of battling poor prices, mad cows and rainless skies have cut a swath out of farm incomes. Mr. Brown's messages, as grim as they are for most of us, have a wonderful silver lining for food producers.

Yet here there is deep skepticism. Paul Beingessner, a farmer in Truax, Sask., who also writes an agricultural column for Prairie weekly newspapers, has gone to one of Mr. Brown's lectures. Afterward, he whimsically dubbed the message "gastronomical Armageddon" and developed an alternative explanation for the decline in the world's grain stocks based on what he sees at the farm gate.

Mr. Beingessner thinks that prices for grains have been low for so long that it doesn't really pay to farm any more, or at least it doesn't pay to invest in the expensive fertilizers, efficient irrigation equipment and other items that would boost crop yields.

He believes that the lack of profit in farming is the main factor driving the fall in food output. "What I'm seeing is that as returns shrink from agriculture as they have been literally for two decades, that farmers are unable to produce to the capacity of the land," he says. "I think [Mr. Brown] is wrong in a lot of ways. We are really under-producing."

If farmers were able to earn decent incomes, he says, they would respond in kind by refilling the world's granaries. "You pay farmers and they'll produce an immense amount more," he predicts.

Mr. Brown, for one, remains doubtful that his forecast food calamity can be avoided.

His book recommends that society take evasive action by having farmers begin to use water more judiciously to ration available supplies. He says emissions of carbon must be cut in half by 2015 to forestall the worst projections of global warming and that the world has to quickly rein in its growing human population.

Doing these things, in Mr. Brown's view, would be a big help to avoid the crisis he foresees. "Whether we're politically capable of doing them remains to be seen. In difficult times, you never know if you're going to have a Nero or a Churchill," he says.

Martin Mittelstaedt is The Globe and Mail's environment reporter.

Reserves as a percentage of consumption

Perhaps the clearest indicator, this measure is at a low of 16.2%

1980: 21.4%

1990: 28.9%

2000: 29.3%

2003: 16.2%

SOURCE: USDA

Web Links

Global Hydrology and Climate Center -- a collaborative venture between MSFC, the State of Alabama's Space Science and Technology Alliance (SSTA), and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) that uses Earth-watching satellites and computer modeling to better understand the Earth's climate system

NOAA Drought Information Center -- wide variety of up-to-date information about droughts, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Texas Dry Spell: A dry spell even worse than the Dust Bowl by some measures struck Texas during the 1950s. The land was not only dry, but also scorching hot. In Dallas temperatures exceeded 100°F on 52 days in the summer of 1953. Because of widespread crop failures, ranchers didn't have enough hay to feed their cattle. Some of the animals survived, barely, on a diet of prickly pear cactus. [More]

US Drought Monitor -- national drought monitoring by the National Drought Mitigation Center

Seasonal Drought Outlook -- from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center

A Quirky El Nino -- (Science@NASA) The 2002-03 El Niño resisted stereotypes with its unpredictable behavior.

Drought: the creeping disaster -- article on drought from NASA's Earth Observatory

Dry Times in North America -- article on drought from NASA's Earth Observatory

North American Drought: a paleo perspective -- an article about evidence for the historical droughts, from NOAA

U.S. drought visible from space -- press release from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Ocean surface temperature data -- latest data from the NASA/CNES Jason-1 satellite

El Niño theme page -- lots of information about El Niño and La Niña, from NOAA

Wildfires Rage Out of Control in Montana

The Associated Press
Saturday, August 6, 2005; 12:35 AM

ALBERTON, Mont. -- A series of wildfires burned out of control late Friday along a major highway in western Montana, prompting authorities to establish roadblocks to keep motorists from getting caught in the billowing smoke.

Flames along Interstate 90 burned right to the edge of the town of Alberton and sometimes into yards. One building was destroyed.

A 90-mile span of the highway had been closed Thursday from just west of Missoula to St. Regis, just east of the Montana-Idaho border. The eastbound lanes were reopened late Friday.

Officials credited quick action by fire crews with saving dozens of houses in this community of 400 people about 28 miles west of Missoula.

Sharon Sweeney, a spokeswoman with the Lolo National Forest, said firefighters were able to save all but the one building, a shop containing vintage cars, tools and antiques.

Outside town, firefighters were digging a line to protect about 10 houses that were still threatened near West Mountain, which was aflame on both its east and west flanks.

State officials closed 20 miles of the Clark Fork River to public use because helicopters with 500-gallon buckets were scooping water from the river to help fight the fires.

Authorities were investigating what started the flames, but said arson or possibly a vehicle dragging something that emitted sparks were both possible causes.

"This absolutely wasn't an act of God," said fire spokesman Scott Waldron.

Also in Montana, a fire in the Bitterroot Valley south of Missoula expanded Friday to at least 1,400 acres. The blaze was being allowed to burn, but firefighters may have to be assigned if it moves out of the wilderness into nearby public forest lands.

Large fires also were active Friday in Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Washington, the National Interagency Fire Center reported. So far this year, wildfires have charred 4.9 million acres, compared with 5.5 million at the same time last year, the center said.

Why so Dry?

The western U.S. is facing yet another summer of severe drought. Science provides some answers -- and some baffling questions.

Wildfires Rage Out of Control in Montana

Smoke haze sparks talks