Gulf swallowing Galveston faster than thought

Harvey Rice in the San Francisco Chronicle, via the AP and the Houston Chronicle: Rising sea levels are likely to cover the coastal highway on the unprotected west end of Galveston sooner than previously predicted. A 2007 study underwritten by the city of Galveston that anticipated rising sea levels would cover the highway within 60 years appears to have been overly optimistic.

The $50,000 geological hazard report was prepared for the city by geologists from the University of Texas, Rice University and Texas A&M University but then shelved. The report based its calculation on historic sea level rise and failed to include climate change. Sea levels are rising much faster than previous estimates that accounted for climate change, according to reports released in December by U.S. government scientists and in November by the World Bank.

"It's higher than the estimates they gave us five years ago," said Jim Lester, president of the Houston Advanced Research Center, whose scientists are experienced in coastal issues.

Sea-level rise may pose an even graver problem for Galveston than other coastal areas because the island is sinking at a faster rate than most other areas in the country, a condition known as subsidence. "If you assume subsidence will occur, that means sea-level rise will be even worse than in the rest of the country," said Stephen Gill, senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Aeronautics Administration, or NOAA.

Erosion and loss of protective wetlands are further eating away at the island, said Val Marmillion, managing director of America's Wetland Foundation. The island could shrink by one-third within 30 years, said Marmillion, whose organization based its conclusions on a $4.2 million study by Entergy of sea-level rise threats to the Gulf Coast....

Water in the streets of Galveston, around 1915, shot by Rex Dunbar Frazier

Drought continues in Texas Panhandle; condition improving, experts say

Mollie Bryant in the Amarillo Globe-News (Texas): The Texas Panhandle is still in the grip of severe drought conditions, but this year’s temperatures and precipitation rates suggest that conditions are improving, meteorologists said.

About 60 percent of the continental United States is experiencing drought, according to the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor’s report released Thursday, but the Texas Panhandle is no stranger to hot, dry weather after going through the worst drought in state history during 2011. The drought took a toll on local water resources, and in October 2011, the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority voted to no longer use water from Lake Meredith, which reached a record low of about 28.6 feet last week according to the authority’s website.

Although this year’s weather has been less extreme, temperatures were still above average and precipitation was below average, National Weather Service meteorologist Andrew Moulton said. Amarillo has had about 12 inches of precipitation so far this year, and although that falls short of our average annual precipitation of 20 inches, it’s still a vast improvement from last year, a record low of about 7 inches, Moulton said.

Right now, weather patterns are stuck are in a neutral phase between El Nino and La Nina, he said. Both weather phenomenons result from sea surface temperatures, but they create opposite weather patterns. La Nina creates warm, dry conditions in the Texas Panhandle while an El Nino is characterized by increased rainfall. ...

Dorothea Lange called this 1938 shot "Tractored out"; Power farming displaces tenants from the land in the western dry cotton area. Childress County, Texas,

Smaller Colorado River projected for coming decades, study says

EurekAlert via the Earth Institute at Columbia University: Some 40 million people depend on the Colorado River Basin for water but warmer weather from rising greenhouse gas levels and a growing population may signal water shortages ahead. In a new study in Nature Climate Change, climate modelers at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory predict a 10 percent drop in the Colorado River's flow in the next few decades, enough to disrupt longtime water-sharing agreements between farms and cities across the American Southwest, from Denver to Los Angeles to Tucson, and through California's Imperial Valley.

"It may not sound like a phenomenally large amount except the water and the river is already over-allocated," said Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and lead author of the new study.

The study expands on findings published in 2007 in the journal Science that the American Southwest is becoming more arid as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns shift from human-caused climate change. It also comes on the heels of a major study of the Colorado River Basin by the U.S. Department of Interior that projected longer and more severe droughts by 2060, and a 9 percent decline in the Colorado's flows.

"The projections are spot on," said Bradley Udall, an expert on hydrology and policy of the American West, at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "Everyone wondered what the next generation of models would say. Now we have a study that suggests we better take seriously the drying projections ahead."

The present study narrows in on three key regions for water managers—the Colorado River headwaters, the greater California-Nevada region and Texas, which gets nearly all of its water from within state borders. The study makes use of the latest models (those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its Fifth Assessment Report due out next fall), to estimate seasonal changes in precipitation, evaporation, water runoff and soil moisture in the near future, 2021-2040. "It's a much finer grain picture than the one we had in 2007," said Seager....

The Colorado River, near Page, Arizona, shot by Adrille, Wikimedia Commons,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license