Read the full story from Illinois Newsroom.
Accurate weather information is important for farmers, emergency responders and researchers managing extreme conditions. But many monitoring networks are limited by unstable, patchwork funding.
Category: Weather
Researcher discovers threshold that triggers drought response in forests
Read the full story from the University of Missouri.
Missouri is home to an array of natural resources, with forests among the state’s most valuable ecosystems. As warmer temperatures fueled by climate change affect ecosystems globally, forests are under stress to adapt to these changes and ensure their survival in a warmer world. Researchers now introduce the ‘ecosystem wilting point’ concept, which explains how whole forests respond to drought.
Detecting the impact of drought on plants with user-friendly and inexpensive techniques
Read the full story from the University of Barcelona.
Climate change is aggravating the impact of droughts — one of the factors that only affect plant physiology — on all plant ecosystems worldwide. Although new tools have been developed to detect and assess drought stress in plants — transcriptomic or metabolomic technologies, etc. — they are still difficult to apply in natural ecosystems, especially in remote areas and developing countries.
Now, a study published in the journal Trends in Plant Science presents a set of techniques that enable researchers to detect and monitor drought stress in plants in a cheap, easy and quick way. The authors of the study are the experts Sergi Munné-Bosch and Sabina Villadangos, from the Faculty of Biology and the Institute for Research on Biodiversity (IRBio) of the University of Barcelona.
House lawmakers join senators in rallying around Colorado River
Read the full story at The Hill.
A bipartisan coalition of House lawmakers are forming a “Congressional Colorado River Caucus,” with the goal of collaborating on ways to best address worsening drought conditions across the seven-state basin.
Here’s why Arizona says it can keep growing despite historic megadrought
Read the full story from NPR.
Arizona has some of the lowest priority rights to the river water of any of the seven basin states. So Phoenix and its suburbs are increasingly turning to groundwater as the state has endured big cuts to Colorado River water.
Facing drought, Western states seek to deny groundwater to foreigners
Read the full story at Stateline.
As the American West battles its worst megadrought in over 1,200 years, state elected officials throughout the region are rethinking how groundwater is used and who gets access to it — with some even targeting foreign-owned companies.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Arizona, California, Texas, Utah and Washington state are considering legislation that aims to protect their states’ water supplies by banning foreign companies from owning or leasing land. Elsewhere in the United States, state lawmakers have rushed to try to ban foreign companies, especially from China after the recent spy balloon saga, from owning land — primarily for national security reasons.
‘This is not a one-off year’: U-M climate expert says more Michigan ice storms likely as warming trend continues
Read the full story from WWJ.
Winter in Southeast Michigan has been relatively quiet this year — until a historic ice storm pommeled the area and knocked out power to more than 600,000 homes and businesses.
Officials are calling it one of the worst winter storms to hit the area in over a decade, but is extreme weather becoming less of an anomaly and more of the norm?
Richard Rood, a professor of climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan College of Engineering, says yes — and what we’re now is only likely to get worse.
Arsenic contaminates private drinking water wells across the western Great Basin
Read the full story from the Desert Research Institute.
In the arid and drought-stricken western Great Basin, sparse surface water means rural communities often rely on private groundwater wells. Unlike municipal water systems, well water quality in private wells is unregulated. A new study shows that more than 49 thousand well users across the region may be at risk of exposure to unhealthy levels of arsenic in drinking water.
A new strategy for western states to adapt to long-term drought: Customized water pricing
by Matthew E. Kahn, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and Bhaskar Krishnamachari, University of Southern California
Even after heavy snow and rainfall in January, western states still face an ongoing drought risk that is likely to grow worse thanks to climate change. A whopping snowpack is good news, but it doesn’t reduce the need for long-term planning.
Confronted with a shrinking supply of water for agriculture, industry and residential uses, water agencies have pursued different strategies to encourage water conservation. They have nudged customers to reduce water use, limited outdoor watering and offered incentives to rip out lawns. On the supply side, there are innovative ideas about using heavy rains to recharge groundwater.
Basic economics teaches us that a higher price for water would encourage conservation. Up until now, however, concerns about harming low-income households have limited discussions about raising water prices to reduce demand.
We know that it’s hard to pay more for essential goods such as food, energy and water, especially for lower-income households. Rather than raising everyone’s water prices, we propose a customized approach that lets individual consumers decide whether to pay higher prices.
Who is most able and willing to conserve?
One of the most common challenges involved in making markets work well is what economists call asymmetric information – when one party has more access to relevant information than the other party. Think about buying or selling a car before online tools like Carfax were available. Owners and dealers knew more about what each car was really worth, so they had greater bargaining power than buyers.
The West has millions of water users with a broad range of incomes who consume water at widely varying levels. These consumers, including urban households, businesses and farmers, know more than water agencies do about how readily they can conserve water.
For example, a person who owns a home with a large green lawn and who is conservation-minded may need only a small incentive to switch to native, low-water plants. Some farmers may need only a small incentive to replace water-intensive alfalfa production with a less water-intensive crop.
Water agencies could elicit this private information by making a “take it or leave it” offer to water consumers. Some of California’s electric utilities have already experimented with this opt-in approach to encourage energy conservation.
Target the big users
Every western water district has access to customer-level big data on monthly and even daily water consumption. Agencies could use this information to identify the top 10% of water consumers in their territories, based on volume used – like the household in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles that used 11.8 million gallons of water in 2014.
Water agencies could randomly select customers among the largest water users in their service areas to participate in a small pilot study. Each invitee would receive an opt-in contract offering to pay them an annual fee for enrolling for three years in a water conservation program. In return, the price the consumer paid for each gallon of water would triple. This approach would give the consumer a guaranteed payment for participating and a clear incentive to use less water.
Data scientists would collect information on who accepted the offer and could survey invitees to learn how they decided whether or not to participate. Combining these two data sets would make it possible to test hypotheses about which factors determined willingness to accept the opt-in offer.
Using customer-level water consumption data over time, water agencies could track usage and compare customers who participated in the price increase program with others who turned down the offer. This would make it possible to estimate the water conservation benefits of introducing customized water prices.
There are many different ways in which water users could cut back, including swapping out old appliances or watering their gardens less often. Farmers could install more efficient irrigation systems. Customers who chose the payment in return for higher prices would decide which conservation strategies worked best for them.
Big potential insights
Conducting a pilot study using a randomly chosen sample of high-usage customers is a low-stakes strategy. If it fails to promote water conservation at a low cost, then a valuable lesson has been learned. If it succeeds, the same opt-in offer could be made to more high-usage customers.
Water agencies would need funds to support the pilot study, possibly from state or federal sources. Since pumping, treating and heating water uses energy, and thus creates greenhouse gas emissions, funds from the Inflation Reduction Act might be an option. Successful water conservation would help to slow climate change.
Today, most water agencies don’t know how responsive individual customers would be to higher prices. By conducting the type of pilot study that we have described, agencies could answer that question without raising prices for vulnerable households. If such initiatives succeeded, they could be replicated in other drought-prone areas of the West. Since farms consume the largest share of water in western states, it is especially important to learn more about farmers’ willingness to conserve.
Water is essential for life, but westerners have different abilities and willingness to conserve it. We recommend a strategy that rewards those who are most able to reduce their usage without punishing those who are least able.
Matthew E. Kahn, Provost Professor of Economics and Spatial Sciences, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Ming Hsieh Faculty Fellow and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Investigating the connection between farming and crop resilience
Read the full story from Indiana University.
Highly variable precipitation is causing headaches for farmers across the Midwest, as they contend with the effects of climate change. To bolster crop yields, more farmers in Indiana and elsewhere are turning to irrigation to offset hot, dry periods. This practice, however, may undermine a natural drought-tolerance strategy that is less costly and doesn’t draw upon limited freshwater resources: soil microbes that help plants survive drought.
IU researchers are leading a unique collaboration between social scientists and biologists to study farmer decision making and the presence of soil microbes that help plants tolerate drought. The work is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
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