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Archive for December 17th, 2014
Rwanda fills climate data gap to protect against storms
Posted by SciDevNet: None Given on December 17th, 2014
SciDevNet: Rwanda's weather service is now better able to forecast floods and other natural disasters after scientists bridged climate-data gaps left by the 1994 genocide.
The collection of national rainfall and temperature records lapsed for after the genocide, and the absence of reliable records had hampered the Rwanda Meteorology Agency's ability to forecast threats such as torrential rain or flooding that damaged homes and crops, and caused fatalities.
But researchers have now combined Rwandan weather...
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‘Creeping humanitarian crisis’ in Central America? Droughts lead crop loss
Posted by Christian Science Monitor: Mike Allison on December 17th, 2014
Christian Science Monitor: On Friday, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) warned that 2.5 million people in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador had been forced into conditions of food insecurity.
The drought in the three countries is “turning into a creeping humanitarian crisis”, Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN’s humanitarian agency, told reporters in Geneva.
Subsistence farmers, farm labourers and low-income families were especially at risk, with young children and pregnant...
California’s water woes quantified
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 17th, 2014
BBC: Scientists have assessed the scale of the epic California drought and say it will require more than 40 cubic km of water to return the US state to normal.
The figure was worked out by weighing the land from space.
The American West Coast has been hit by big storms in recent days, but this rainfall is only expected to make a small dent in California's problems.
Researchers described their research at the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
The US space agency (Nasa)...
Drought Recovery? California Will Need 11 Trillion Gallons Water
Posted by Nature World: None Given on December 17th, 2014
Nature World: California has been suffering from a three-year-drought that is the worst the region has seen in more than a millennium. Now an analysis conducted by NASA has revealed that in order for the state to recover from its current predicament, it's going to have to gain 11 trillion gallons of water back somehow.
That finding was part of an overall review of the drought's recent peak, which was conducted by NASA experts and presented Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco....
Obama Indefinitely Bans Drilling in Alaskan Bay
Posted by New York Times: Peter Baker on December 17th, 2014
New York Times: President Obama on Tuesday again used his executive authority to enact an environmental priority as he indefinitely barred oil and gas exploration of Alaska’s picturesque Bristol Bay to protect some of the nation’s most productive commercial fisheries. Mr. Obama first put the ecologically sensitive area of the Bering Sea — home to an important population of whales, seals and sea lions — off limits to oil rigs in 2010, but that restriction was set to expire in 2017, several months after he leaves...
Early winter storms put dent California drought
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on December 17th, 2014
Reuters: A trifecta of early winter storms that swept California with heavy rain and snow in the past two weeks put a promising dent in a severe drought entering its fourth year, but the water shortage remains far from over, water officials said on Tuesday.
Depleted reservoirs and the Sierra Nevada snowpack, which normally constitutes the state's largest natural store of fresh surface water, received a welcome boost from successive Pacific storms on Dec. 1-2, Dec. 11-12 and again on Monday and Tuesday....