11/13/2023 0 Comments Father son forest fire montana![]() While each hurricane springs from a complex string of atmospheric events, scientists say all are occurring in an environment that’s warmer and wetter. “That’s the political twist that frustrates climate scientists.” “They’re talking about getting by with less water, and ignoring the fact that it’s less and less and less as long as it gets warmer and warmer and warmer,” said Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan who specializes in drought and water. Will that be enough, however, as the desert Southwest keeps getting hotter? Meanwhile, the Elephant Butte Irrigation District is trying to capture as much stormwater as possible during intense rainstorms and channel it into the river system. That allows water to be distributed evenly, without waste. In addition to experimentation with drip irrigation, farmers use lasers to finely slope the ground in their orchards. There’s plenty of innovation underway throughout the valley and in pecan production, which has boomed in New Mexico, bringing in a record harvest of 92 million pounds and sales of $220 million in 2017. The ultimate solution, Hill insists, is to keep finding smart ways to use less water. ![]() Not everyone agrees with this theory, or with Laura Hill’s concerns that climate change may threaten pecan farming in the valley. So there’s less snow and ice in the mountains, and, scientists theorize, the water that does run off is evaporating faster, because of those higher temperatures, and before the river reaches the southern farms. But the state has had an extraordinary warming streak since about 1970, seeing the average annual temperature rise by more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit in just under 50 years. The mountain snowpack in the southern Rockies and parts of northern New Mexico that feeds the Rio Grande’s headwaters has declined about 25 percent since the late 1950s, said David Gutzler, a climate scientist at the University of New Mexico.Īs for temperature: New Mexico certainly saw some warm days in the 1930s, at the time of the Dust Bowl. Many folks in the valley talk about the intense drought of the 1950s, when New Mexico farmers first began installing pumps to extract groundwater to irrigate their pecan orchards and fields of chiles and alfalfa.īut something is different about the drought this time, many climate scientists suspect. The region has suffered through long, dry spells before. “That long-term sink capacity is permanently gone.” “When they get hammered so intensely, and we don’t get regeneration, they’re no longer like forest sites anymore, they’re grassland sites,” Cleaves said. ![]() Instead, they shift into a different state. Maybe, in a new climate regime, forests don’t grow back in the same way. ![]() Normally, forests that died off would grow back and return to drawing carbon out of the atmosphere, providing what scientists call a “sink.”īut the fields of what Golden called “pick-up sticks” suggest a more worrying idea. The elk adapt, but it’s not clear that the forests will. It could be, he said, that with so many downed trees, elk can see hunters from much farther away and avoid them.īut Hebblewhite added that the elk are still out there, simply adapting to changing forests as they always have. “The hunter’s perception is definitely correct that fires really do shift elks around the landscape,” added Mark Hebblewhite, an elk specialist at the University of Montana in Missoula. ![]() The Goldens climbed in the cold Montana air for eight hours that day, crossing fields of felled trees left behind in the wake of a 2000 wildfire, without seeing any elk. ![]()
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