Good News for March (kind of)
Increased precipitation in parts of the west
Rain Predicted Throughout the Western United States for March
TL;DR: rain and cooler temperatures are predicted for very Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, into the western Rockies for the month of March. This is great news, as February has been drier than normal.
That’s great news. Despite lots of rain and snow in December and January, February has been warmer, and here in Seattle I can look to the mountains and see not enough snowpack. A note that when snow pack melts before late spring/ early summer, soils are leached of moisture, and plants who rely on those soils begin to die and/or increase in flammability. Fuel moisture is a huge component to how fast and hot a fire will burn, and soil moisture is an integral piece to fuel moisture. It’s all connected.
But…
The southwest isn’t doing so hot (or maybe it is doing too hot). When I first began working on the hotshots (2001), the southwest was one step into a drought that has, twenty-one years later, become the worst drought in the region since 800AD. The worst drought in 1,200 years.
I have a hard time conceiving of time in general, but that doesn’t sound good.
Keep in mind that this drought has been building since the west was colonized and water irrigated to levels unseen before the presence of Europeans. (Indigenous people of the Southwest practiced irrigation, but always in hand with what the land could handle).
Many articles point out how the drought is affecting dams, but few point out how the dams throughout the southwest could have led us to this specific point in a thousand-years drought by encouraging water use in arid lands and shifting ecological equilibrium.
WATCH: The Cracking of Glen Canyon Dam with Edward Abbey and Earth First
What are your thoughts?
