I'm getting a lot of interesting photos and updates from friends who live in the Boulder area. One of the most amazing things to me is the geographical extent of flooding. Some information on the weather patterns that created such extreme rainfall is coming out...really interesting stuff. Unfortunately there is also a growing list of people who are unaccounted for. Here are some links to articles that include some of the newer info:
My body is still in Tennessee today but my heart and mind are with friends, colleagues and relatives in Colorado.
I was living in Allenspark in 1976 when 8 inches of rain fell in one hour (and more than 12 inches in less than 4 hours) over the Big Thompson watershed to the north of us. The 20-foot wall of water that scoured the canyon that night took around 143 human lives and left us all with memorable images of the power of natural forces in extreme weather.
Just six years later, on July 16, 1982, the Lawn Lake dam -- an earthen structure high in the same larger watershed in Rocky Mountain National Park -- collapsed. As the flood water hit the Cascade Dam a couple of miles downstream, it too collapsed. This flood killed 3 people and did about $31-million in damage to Estes Park and communities further downstream.
An alluvial fan of debris was created as Lawn Lake flood waters broke out into Horseshoe Park [Photo credit: U.S. Geological Survey]
As a former active member of the Boulder County fire and emergency services community, I trained with and had many friends among the mountain fire departments such as Four Mile and Lefthand Canyon that are no doubt very busy today with too much -- rather than too little -- water, and have suffered some painful losses in their communities with this flooding.
If you have travelled any of these canyons that shuttle water out of the Rocky Mountains to the valleys below, you may have seen "climb to safety" signs spaced out along the routes. Placement of signs, upgrading flood watch protocols and, in Rocky Mountain National Park, the removal of old dams following these major events reflected the sharper attention to flash flood potential and its deadly consequences.
I hope that efforts taken back then to improve safety of citizens and emergency response in flood conditions gave Boulder, Larimer and other Colorado counties a better chance to avoid loss of life over the past couple of days. I hope that the lives lost so far in Boulder County will be the only ones, and that preparation for such events by first responders and law enforcement officers will help them stay safer as they do their jobs for their communities in these 2013 floods.
I have photos of Big Thompson and Lawn Lake flood damages but have not scanned them from slides yet. If I can find them, I'll post an update to this post.
Stay safe, everybody!
Here are some links to coverage of Colorado flooding:
In light of extreme flooding going on in Boulder County, Colorado, this week, this new report might be useful for connecting to broader perspectives on the relation of mega-weather events and climate change:
Human influences are having an impact on some extreme weather and climate events, according to the report Explaining Extreme Events of 2012 from a Climate Perspective released September 5, 2013 by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Scientists from NOAA served as three of the four lead editors on the report. Overall, 18 different research teams from around the world contributed to the peer-reviewed report that examined the causes of 12 extreme events that occurred on five continents and in the Arctic.
While several thousand square kilometers of land area have been subject to surface mining in the Central Appalachians, no reliable estimate exists for how much coal is produced per unit landscape disturbance. We provide this estimate using regional satellite-derived mine delineations and historical county-level coal production data for the period 1985–2005, and further relate the aerial extent of mining disturbance to stream impairment and loss of ecosystem carbon sequestration potential. To meet current US coal demands, an area the size of Washington DC would need to be mined every 81 days. A one-year supply of coal would result in ~2,300 km of stream impairment and a loss of ecosystem carbon sequestration capacity comparable to the global warming potential of >33,000 US homes. For the first time, the environmental impacts of surface coal mining can be directly scaled with coal production rates.
Citation: Lutz BD, Bernhardt ES, Schlesinger WH (2013) The Environmental Price Tag on a Ton of Mountaintop Removal Coal. PLoS ONE 8(9):
e73203.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0073203
Thousands of citizens have gathered on the mall in DC today to ask President Obama to move forward on climate and energy policy. The activists involved represent different campaigns and strategies to protect the Earth and restore ecological balance. Today they all march as one.
For several months, First Nations citizens of Canada, Native American Nations and many non-Indigenous allies have worked to reaffirm unity of the human family and love for Mother Earth. Check out the video and other links below to explore the growing movement.
This still image of Super Typhoon Bopha was taken by Expedition 34
Commander Kevin Ford on Sunday, Dec. 2 from the International Space
Station, as the storm bore down on the Philippines with winds of 135
miles per hour. Parts of the orbital outpost are seen in the
picture -- the Permanent Multipurpose Module on the left, and
Mini-Research Module 1 on the right.Image and caption credit: NASA
Also check out this 3-D analyzation of Bopha provided by NASA's TRMM satellite, and related article linked below.
Some of the hashtags being used on Twitter are #Pablo, #PabloPH, #Bopha, and #Philippines. I found many good informational links being shared there, as well as wishes from people around the world for the well-being of survivors.
Interesting article about a community that has contributed very little to climate
change, but are feeling the effects in profound ways.
For the most part, many people still experience climate change on an academic rather than a personal level. But for the villagers of Vunidogoloa on Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second largest island, climate change has become a daily intrusion on every day life. The villagers of Vunidogoloa are currently relocating to drier and higher land because of sea level rise, erosion, and intensifying floods. I had the opportunity to visit the village midway through this process – one of the very first village relocation projects in the world – and spoke with people young and old about their upcoming move.
In an interesting analysis of the Romney-Ryan Energy Plan, Bill Chameides used the "word cloud" app. Word clouds can be a very revealing way to look at ideas.
Read the rest of Bill's analysis (which includes a link to a pdf of the Plan) at www.huffingtonpost.com
Researchers have not yet determined whether this extensive melt event will affect the overall volume of ice loss this summer and contribute to sea level rise.
"The Greenland ice sheet is a vast area with a varied history of change. This event, combined with other natural but uncommon phenomena, such as the large calving event last week on Petermann Glacier, are part of a complex story," said Tom Wagner, NASA's cryosphere program manager in Washington. "Satellite observations are helping us understand how events like these may relate to one another as well as to the broader climate system."
