A tree’s genetics picks its fungus

From Ars Technica, an interesting study about the Pinyon pine and its fungal associations.

...
Researchers took seeds from drought-tolerant and drought-intolerant trees, then exposed them to soil containing fungal communities from both drought-tolerant and drought-intolerant roots. Even when grown with the opposite soil, the seeds ignored the local fungal community; both drought-tolerant and drought-intolerant seeds still cultivated the same species of fungus as their adult forbears.

It turned out that the inheritance of the fungus is what actually made the different trees drought-tolerant or drought intolerant; seeds from drought-tolerant mothers only grew larger than their drought-intolerant cousins when in the presence of their attendant fungi. The tree’s genetics simply helped it recruit specific species of fungi.
...

Twitter leaves me bitter, but...

...I have an interest in Pinterest. 

http://www.pinterest.com/brentamorgan

I'm so new to it, that I had trouble finding the URL that links to my page, but from what I've seen I've completely abandoned previously held Pinterest skeptic point of view.  As I figure things out, I'll try to get these blog posts to send automatically to Pinterest, much like I use RSS Graffiti to post to Facebook.

I'm still a Twitter skeptic (though I have had an account for years with all of two tweets being sent);  I simply don't want to read about anything 140 characters at a time.

Calflora Mobile Search

Following on the previous blog post, also available from Calflora Calflora Mobile Search for plants, an interface to the Calflora database for mobile devices. Click on a plant name, and you will see one or two photos of the plant. Works on Android and iPhone. Check the current location box and (courtesy of HTML5) it will limit the search to plants observed growing near wherever you are.

Calflora Observer app for Android and iPhone

Back in last year's blog post "Ready to go live with What's Invasive!" I wrote about a smart phone app called What's Invasive!, an application used for mapping invasive plants.

The makers of What's Invasive! have teamed with Calflora to make the Calflora Observer Observer smart phone application with the purpose of making observations of wild plants, including photos, on your Android or iPhone. It's a free download and I'll be firing it up soon. Whereas What's Invasive relied on user- or community-defined plant lists, Observer allows reporting of any plant.

Creek Watch app

A fresh update of the Creek Watch app reminded me that I ought to actually use it, so tonight I took a stroll along the Dominguez Channel and made a few reports.

From the friendly app:
"Creek Watch enables you to help monitor your watershed. Creeks and streams are a vital part of watersheds; they provide water to drink and sustain plant and animal life. However, they can also be a pathway for pollution to spread, and they are often too numerous for water boards to monitor without help.

Creek Watch provides an easy way to lend a hand by reporting on any waterway you pass. We then aggregate reports and share them with water control boards to help them track pollution,
manage water resources, and plan environmental programs.

Creek Watch is an IBM Smarter Planet Project developed by IBM Research-Almaden. To learn more visit http://www.creekwatch.org."

- Posted at great expense from my iPhone

While we're talking about rain

I've noticed that many of my recent posts are simply cataloging rainfall. That's an appropriate activity for a garden journal type of blog, but just how accurate and useful are my figures?

I now have six years of data to compare against a generic, but official, "Los Angeles" rainfall and I'm happy to report that my measurements correlate well with the official Los Angeles measurements. See below how there's a straight line relationship between my measurements and the official ones? I take that as a good sign. I think that the offset in the official measurement is due to their better sensitivity to heavy fog / light rain. For instance, yesterday it rained enough to wet the concrete at my house, but not enough to measure. I will bet they have more sensitive measurements at the official Los Angeles weather station.

Just how useful my rainfall figures are is debatable. Certainly, I put them to good use in my rain barrel series, a stunningly insightful bit of analysis that made blindingly obvious the merely "quite clear" . For the conspiracy theorists among us, I've also independently correlated official government rainfall reports, so at least we know they're less likely to be lying about the rain. Now about that moon landing.... However, for me the greatest usefulness is the satisfaction that I get as a citizen scientist.  I suppose I ought to aspire to sounding rockets or weather balloons or at least a higher degree of automation.  Maybe later.

Percolation theoretic understanding of landscape ecology

Sometimes I have good ideas.  Less often those ideas are new.  Given my interest in native plants as habitat, about 6 months ago I thought I would try to model wildlife migration on a grid (which would stand in for typical suburban lots) using percolation theory.  However, a quick Google search turns up lots of prior work.  So this is only a potentially good idea that isn't even novel.

The first article that I read was confusing on more than one level.  Give the first page a read (or not) below.  My guess is that you'll quickly get bogged down and skip past it.

Neutral Models: Useful Tools for Understanding Landscape Patterns
SCOTT M. PEARSON and ROBERT H. GARDNER
8.1 Introduction
A neutral model is a minimum set of rules required to generate pattern in the absence of a particular process (or set of processes) being studied. The results of the neutral model provide a means of testing the effect of the measured process on patterns that are actually observed (Caswell l976). If observed patterns do not differ from the neutral model, then the measured process has not significantly affected the observed pattern. Conversely, when results differ from model predictions in a way that is consistent with a particular process, then strong evidence for the importance of this process has been obtained. Several authors have argued that formulation of a proper neutral model is necessary for hypothesis testing, because data often exhibit nonrandom patterns in the absence of the causal mechanisms of interest (Quinn and Dunham 1983). This approach has been discussed extensively in the field of community ecology (e.g., Conner and Simberloff 1984, 1986; Haefner 1988) as well as other areas of biology (Nitecki and Hoffman 1987).

Neutral models are useful in landscape ecology, a field of ecology that emphasizes the complex relationships between landscape pattern and ecological process (Turner 1989, Gardner and O'tieill1991). Processes, such as disturbance, can produce landscape patterns by changing the abundance and location of habitat patches (Baker 1992). Likewise, patterns have important effects on ecological processes. For example, habitat fragmentation affects metapopulation dynamics (Holt et al. 1995), gene flow (Ballal et a1.1994), and dispersal (Santos and Telleria 1994). The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the usefulness of neutral models to landscape ecology by discussing how neutral models (1) assist the investigator in understanding patterns in spatial data and (2) are useful for generating maps for quantifying the effect of landscape pattern on ecological processes.

8.2 A Simple Neutral Model
Neutral models help landscape ecologists understand relationships between measures of spatial pattern and landcover abundance. A simple neutral model designed to explore the effect of changes in the abundance of a habitat on the spatial pattern of landcover (Gardner et al. 1987) was derived from the principles of percolation theory (Stauffer and Aharony 1992).



Was I right?

Even after reading this article several times, I don't have a good plain English understanding of what they are trying to say.  This isn't helped by the fact that I seem to have stumbled upon a small tempest in a teapot regarding the use of a neutral model versus a null model.  In population ecology and related fields, a null model seems to be a migration model fit with constraints measured from data whereas the neutral model attempts a statistically based description that can be scaled to data.  I'm probably wrong, but that's what I'm going with right now.

Interesting article

This is from the automatically-generated Google results in the sidebar of my blog.  Often, the factual, new or interesting native plant content is thin, since it's just a keyword-driven search result.  However, this article http://media-newswire.com/release_1125304.html about Tidestrom's lupin has a good lay description of some detailed modeling.  If you have a scientific bent, then you ought to give it a read.

Ready to go live with What's Invasive!

I've written about What's Invasive! recently.

Briefly, it is an iDevice application (iPhone and Android are currently supported) that is used for mapping invasive plants. Users send geo-referenced photos to a server that provides community confirmation of identification and a map of confirmed locations. This type of map is useful for wildlands and green space management.

After a brief learning process spread over several days I've managed to get the Palos Verdes Peninsula database up and running. It ought to be live any time now pending some finalization that takes place on the server side by teh site administrator. There are at present only four invasive plants that are being tracked, but that's not a limit that we're stuck with, it's just what I felt was appropriate to start.

The most recent newcomer to on the invasives list is Terracina Spurge (Euphorbia terracina). The other three are Anise (Foeniculum vulgare), Castorbean (Ricinus communis), and Giant Reed (Arundo donax). I don't know that there's any A. donax, but I do know that the others are possibly the most common of any plant in the PV wilds. A chart accompanying the following link cites 60+ acres of a 200 acre fire area dominated solely by F. vulgare. In fact, they are considered the dominant invasive plant by the PV Peninsula Land Conservancy.:

The dominant non-native species within the grassland community of the Reserve are wild oats (Avena fatua), black mustard (Brassica nigra), short pod mustard (Hirschfeldia incana), and sweet fennel (Foeniculum vulgare). Non-native tree stands were also present along the main trails and hilltops. Non-native acacia (Acacia cyclops), eucalyptus and pine species are also dominant in the pre-fire vegetation communities of the Reserve.

Eventually the plants list ought to expand to include all the above plants.

What's Invasive!

Here's a promising app for your smart phone / iDevice from UCLA's Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS).

I stumbled across the What's Invasive app for Android and iPhone last night.  The idea is that you can take a geo-referenced (with your handy GPS) photo of an invasive plant and/or make a brief note.  The photo is then sent to a central server where they can be publicly evaluated (so that everyone knows that you aren't taking photos of your kids and calling them weeds) and mapped so that remediation efforts can be well-targeted.

The Whats Invasive! website has a variety of areas defined for this mapping effort, but on the iPhone the only region that can currently be reported is the Santa Monica mountains - a useful target area for test due to its proximity to Santa Monica / West LA and the scads of iPhoners that live there.  The Andriod app works with all reporting areas.

If you are not an iPhone or Android user you can still participate by regular mobile phone or old fashioned email / web access.  They don't appear to have telegram or postcard interfaces written yet.

If your favorite reporting area is not defined, then you can create your own on their web site, subject to admin approval. I've created a Palos Verdes Penninsula locale, but beyond Brassica and Foeniculum I'm not sure what invasive species to put there. I seem to recall a recent threat by a new invasive species that had thought to be a non-issue.

• Mobile Phones. Non GPS-enabled phones are also useful for capturing notes and photos (see Instructions: Email), and geolocation can be establshed later through our website (see Instructions: My Data & Photos) help page.
• Email & Web. Email us (with optional photo) with the plant name as the subject to: mobile@whatinvasive.com. Or, log in and go to the My Data page to create a new observation from your computer. Read more on our Instructions: email associations help page.

Two other apps that might appeal to readers of this blog that use the same or similar mapping strategy are:

• Biketastic! for documenting good routes and for collecting data to improve them.
• What's Bloomin for recording locations of blooming plants in your neighborhood.

However, quick checks on their web presence seemed to indicate that they are not quite fully formed yet. I suggest a check back later.

How much shade does that north-facing slope get?

Juli has a back yard area that slopes to the north that she has designated the "native plant zone". I'm in charge of that part. The native plant zone contains the garage (with deep shade around it due to close proximity of a retaining wall and the garage eaves), a partially paved alley, lots of weeds, and ivy from the neighbors. Juli gets the roses and grass in the main part of the yard that is visible from the house.

A tall, roofed, patio structure sits at the top of the native plant zone, completely eliminating any possibility of sun at this time of year. However, it looks like it does get summer sun, as shown in the Google maps satellite image below. (Most good satellite imagery will be around noonish so as to eliminate large shadows. Summer time is least likely to have clouds, so it's not surprising that the image appears to have been taken near noon in summer.) Her's is the house at the center of the image. The patio roof is the bright white horizontal band.  Above it is the garage and sloped hillside that is designated as the native plant zone.

When the angle of the sun in the sky equals the angle from the bottom of the slope to the top of the patio roof, then the sun will be shining at the bottom of the slope.  The time of year that this occurs might influence my plant choices, so let's be a little more rigorous about when we can expect sun to peak over the edge of the patio roof and down the hill. Since the hillside is almost entirely north facing, I don't have too many complications with this calculation - If the slope were NW to SE I might have to think more about morning sun versus afternoon sun. I'll just think about noon time sun and remember that the sun always has a southerly direction our latitude.

Measuring the slope of the hill
There's a couple iPhone apps to measure angles out in the field. I tried one called Sextant that doesn't really do the job very well for me. I should have known better when the blurb read "This shiny new gold sextant would make a pirate proud" I next downloaded a more sophisticated app called Clinometer by Peter Breitling which was free for a short time and immediately after my download popped up at $0.99. Finally, there's a visual clinometer called SlopeView by Sten Kaiser which seems a reasonable choice (also $0.99) which I may try if the previous two don't work out. I'll use one of them to take a field measurement of the angle from the bottom of the hill to the top of the patio.

Once I know the slope of the hill, the question then is at what time of year the sun will get to that angle in the sky.  Here's how I'll figure it out:

Maximum and minimum sun angle
I'll figure the relationship between time of year and angle of the sun using this method: I found the latitude of Juli's house using Google maps*. If the earth had no tilt, then the sun would shine directly down on the equator at 90 degrees and (90 - Juli's latitude) would be the angle of the sun to her house. But, there is a built in tilt of the earth is 23.5 degrees and we can take that into account as follows:

During winter solstice the northern hemisphere is tilted back at an angle from the sun so the sun shines at (90 - latitude - 23.5) degrees.

During summer solstice the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun so the sun shines at (90 - latitude + 23.5) degrees.

Interpolating linearly between solstices we get:

Date      Sun Angle
1/21/2010 40.99
2/21/2010 48.95
3/21/2010 56.14
4/21/2010 64.10
5/21/2010 71.80
6/21/2010 79.77 Summer solstice
7/21/2010 72.06
8/21/2010 64.10
9/21/2010 56.14
10/21/2010 48.43
11/21/2010 40.47
12/21/2010 32.77 Winter solstice

So, while I have yet to actually measure the angle of the hillside+patio roof, it is reasonable that it's entirely shaded now (when the sun is only at an angle of 40 degrees) since reasonable slopes probably don't exceed 45 to 50 degrees or so. However, in summer, it's a rare north-facing hillside that doesn't get at least a little sun when the sun has a steep sun angle like ~80 degrees. Up next to steep north-facing cliffs or edges of houses it will still be shaded at noon, but little else will be.

I guess this is all obvious stuff, since my major conclusion is that north facing slopes with reasonable angles of repose still get noontime summer sun.  Still, actually knowing a date when it will get sun can help guide plant selection. Of course, I'm ignoring the sun angle at times other than noon - the sun may rise north of east and set north of west in summer, thereby giving morning or evening light on north-facing slopes. However, we all know that morning or evening sun is less intense than noon sun.

Calculating hours of sunlight is a more difficult task. I found an iPhone app called DaylightCal that may suit my needs.  More later when I find out about that app.

---

*It's buried in the Google Maps URL or link. So if I go to Google map San Pedro, CA and then look closely in the URL or at the embedable link, I'll see a bit of text that looks like ll=33.722696,-118.29117 buried mid way through the address. From that little bit of info I can glean that San Pedro, CA. is at 33.722696 degrees north latitude.

iPhone apps for California flora and fauna

Emily Green has an article over on her blog on some iPhone apps useful for California wildflower and animal identification.

Her pick, and I agree, is the Southern California wildflower iPhone app from Earth Rover Software. There's also a Sierra wildflower app that may come in handy this summer and a Santa Monica Mountains app. Each is $9.99 on iTunes.

Match rockets

Science fair season is over. Phew.

Silent PCs

I've become enamored with quiet, power-sipping, small form factor computers for the home. I like them because they are unobtrusive visually and audibly, yet can be always on without major guilt over the power consumption.

If quiet is the only goal, then the End PC Noise folks seem to have a lock on the quiet PC accessories and systems. Their systems are not typically fanless nor particularly low power. They do have a lot of products to quiet your desktop PC. But my major home applications don't require tons of computing horsepower, so there's no need for every computer in my home to be heavy iron. Here's where the small and efficient computers come in.

Of course there's small laptops and netbook form factors, which are nice and stowable, but there are other candidate form factors that are more efficient, smaller, and sometimes more powerful.

fit-PC2 Available this month. Fanless. Less than $400 fully configured. Can stream HD video with 10-40% CPU load. Atom based.

ZaReason has the 'Breeze 3660' for $350 which consumes 30 W.

I've read that Shuttle will soon make an external power supply version of the Shuttle KPC, which would eliminate the pesky fan noise.

Local suppliers PC Liquidators have inexpensive micro and mini -ATX cases and the like, in case you want to make your own.

Any number of small linux distributions are available on lightweight computers.
DamnSmallLinux is one example that seems close to a best of breed. There's also Cappuccino and a personal favorite (for no apparent reason other than the product seems like good value) Z-Tech Services.

Successful launch

Before I left on travel, I had the opportunity to watch the successful launch of WGS SV2. (That's Wideband Global Satcom Space Vehicle 2.) Here's some material cribbed from ulalaunch.com


Cape Canaveral, Fla., (Updated April 3 - 10 p.m. EDT) - A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket successfully launched the Air Force’s second Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS) satellite into orbit at 8:31 p.m. EDT, today. WGS-2 joins the service’s first WGS satellite, which also launched on an Atlas V Oct. 10, 2007. Today’s launch, along with WGS-1, took place from Space Launch Complex 41. The WGS system will significantly increase the communications capabilities for troops in the field.


“ULA congratulates the Air Force and our mission partners on the successful launch of WGS-2,” said James Bell, ULA WGS Mission Manager. “ULA is proud of its continuing role of providing reliable assured access to space for the Air Force’s critical missions. WGS is a force multiplier for our troops in the field who defend America’s freedom everyday.”


The WGS-2 mission is the second installment of the Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS) system. The WGS satellites are important elements of a new high-capacity satellite communications system providing enhanced communications capabilities to America’s troops in the field for the next decade and beyond. WGS enables more robust and flexible execution of Command and Control, Communications Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR), as well as battle management and combat support information functions. WGS-2 augments the existing service of the WGS-1 satellite by providing additional information broadcast capabilities.


This mission was launched by an Atlas V 421 configuration, which uses a 4-meter diameter payload fairing, two solid rocket motors, and a single-engine Centaur upper stage attached to a single common core booster powered by the RD-180 engine. This was the 15th launch in Atlas V program history. The 14 previous Atlas V launches included two missions for NASA, two for the United States Air Force, three for the National Reconnaissance Office and seven for commercial customers.


Formed in 2006, ULA combines the successful Atlas and Delta expendable launch vehicle programs offering cost-effective and reliable launch services to U.S. government customers, including the Department of Defense, NASA, the NRO, and commercial organizations.

Still waiting

From ulalaunch.com

(Updated April 1- 10 a.m. EDT) - The launch of the Air Force's Wideband Global SATCOM-2 satellite aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is scheduled for April 3 with a launch window of 8:31-9:33 p.m. EDT. The Launch Readiness Review for the mission will be held later today and the Atlas V is scheduled to rollout to the pad at Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral AFS, Fla., tomorrow at 9 a.m. EDT.

This is third Atlas V launch for the Air Force following the STP-1 and WGS-1 launches in 2007. The WGS SV-2 mission marks the 15th Atlas V launch in program history and is the fifth overall launch for ULA in 2009. WGS SV-2 is the second installment of the Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS) system. WGS is an important element of a new high-capacity satellite communications system providing enhanced communications capabilities to our troops in the field for the next decade and beyond. The first spacecraft alone is providing more capacity than the entire Defense Satellite Communications System constellation currently on orbit. This equates to 10 times the capacity of DSCS. A third WGS satellite will launch on a Delta IV later this year.

Almost time

See ulalaunch.com.

The brown animal on the WGS logo is a platypus.

One degree warmer may not seem like a lot

The title of the post is a quote from the following article, which I found at the LA Times.

I've mentally poo-poohed some sort of global systems engineering approach to deal with warming, but the rate of the change seems to demand a faster short term solution than we can get any other way. If we can buy a few decades with an engineering solution and if we're not too near the precipice of catastrophic change, then we can probably legislate a more durable solution.



West's trees dying faster as temperatures rise
A study of old-growth forests predicts that if the trend continues, it could alter not just the region's woodlands, but the quality of wildlife habitat and forests' ability to store carbon.
By Bettina Boxall
January 23, 2009
More trees are dying in the West's forests as the region warms, a trend that could ultimately spell widespread change for mountain landscapes from the Sierra Nevada to the Rockies.

Scientists who examined decades of tree mortality data from research plots around the West found the death rate had risen as average temperatures in the region increased by more than 1 degree Fahrenheit.

"Tree death rates have more than doubled over the last few decades in old-growth forests across the Western United States," said U.S. Geological Survey scientist Phillip van Mantgem, coauthor of a paper published in today's issue of the journal Science and released Thursday.

The researchers found rising death rates across a wide variety of forest types, at different elevations, in trees of all sizes and among major species, including pine, fir and hemlock.

"Wherever we looked, mortality rates are increasing," said Nathan Stephenson, a study coauthor and USGS research ecologist.

Tree death rates had risen the most rapidly in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and southern British Columbia, Canada, doubling in 17 years. But the highest mortality -- more than 1.5% a year -- showed up in California.

If temperatures continue to rise, as many climate models predict, "it's very likely that mortality rates will continue to rise," Stephenson said.

That could eventually alter not just the face of Western woodlands, but the quality of wildlife habitat and forests' ability to store carbon. Extensive tree die-back could lead to wholesale landscape changes, converting forests in borderline areas to grass and shrublands.

see the rest at the LA Times.

Fog!

The fog rolled in last night. I like the fog, but it has become an increasingly rare occurrence in recent years. I've read that this is due to the heat island effect. The heat island effect simple states that the sun will warm a parking lot or other low-shade urban area more effectively than a grassy meadow. The slight rise in overnight temperatures due to residual heat can tip the balance away from fog-forming conditions. Urbanization is also blamed for altering normal wind patterns and therefore contributing to changes in fog frequency. However, that's not the whole story. It turns out that there's also correlation of the decrease in coastal fog over the last 22 years to the decrease in airborne particulates (because we've improved our particulate emissions the airborne water vapor has fewer particles to condense upon) and to periodic, long-term, ocean water temperatures.

Many native plants are adapted to take advantage of the coastal fog and drip the condensate from their leaves into the root line. My memory is vague on this, but I recall reading an article a while back that claimed some large fraction of the soil moisture in redwood forests came from condensed fog. (The figure I seem to recall was near 50%).

My electrician, an old timer with a long history in the area, commented that he used to have to open the door on his car and navigate by the center stripe on the road in the early morning hours. That used to be fairly common a couple decades ago, but he hadn't seen fog like that recently.

Driving to work this AM shortly after sunrise, I noticed that the fog was denser over the grassy fields of nearby schools, suggesting a very local observation of the heat island effect.

The abstract below from "Trends in fog frequencies in the Los Angeles Basin" by M.R. Witiwa and Steve LaDochy is informative.

Data from throughout the Los Angeles area were examined to determine the horizontal distribution of dense fog (visibility < 400 m) in the region and trends over time. The relationship between the occurrence of dense fog to the phase of two atmosphere–ocean cycles: the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) measured by the PDO Index and the Southern Oscillation measured by the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) was investigated. In addition, the influence of the urban heat island and the amount of suspended particulate matter were assessed. For the three stations that had 22 or more years of data, we examined trends and the relation to atmosphere–ocean cycles. Results show a decrease in the occurrence of very low visibilities (< 400 m) at the stations in close proximity to the Pacific Ocean, Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and Long Beach International Airport (LGB). Occurrence of the frequency of low visibilities at these two locations was also highly correlated with the phase of the PDO. Only a weak, non-statistically significant relationship was seen with the SOI. At Burbank, a reporting station about 30 km from the ocean, no trends were noted, and there was no evidence of a correlation with either the PDO Index or the SOI. In the Los Angeles Central Business District (CBD) when comparing dense fog occurrence in the early 1960s to a similar period in the early 2000s we saw a decrease in dense fog from a mean of 10 h per year to a mean of 3 h per year. Also contributing to the decrease was decreasing particulate pollution and increased urban warming. A downward trend in particulate concentrations coupled with an upward trend in urban temperatures were associated with a decrease in dense fog occurrence at both LAX and LGB [Long Beach Airport]. These trends were evident for the period 1966–1997, but appear to have ended by the late 1990s.

Back to water II

BadMomGoodMom sent me this nice URL to the National Weather Service who have a nice graphical tool for looking at precipitation, both current and historical. She's got a current post about local rainfall, and I thought I'd sing along.

I've graphed here the precipitation for calendar year 2007 across the entire U.S. I've been unable to find a way to graph the water year, which runs from Aug 1 to July 31, but these pictures will suffice. The scale of the images is in percentage of normal, as shown below. What's normal? I'd assume that the NWS uses median rainfall as "normal", but regardless of what they use if they indicate 0-50% of normal, then that means little rain.



Remember all the drought news from Georgia last year? You can see it here as the yellow-red zones at the right of the country. We're looking similar to Georgia in terms of percentage of normal rainfall over on the west coast. The differences in impact last year (it seemed a larger news story that Georgia was dry) seem mostly due to the fact that Georgia has a fast growing population and no history of prior water shortages that would have forced it into planning for drought.

Now let's look at January of 2008 in a region a little closer to home, below.
That's Catalina Island off the coast of California. The city names are readable if you click on the images.



Wasn't January 2008 a nice change from 2007? It shows a comfortable margin above normal almost across the board. If the trend had continued, we wouldn't be talking about drought quite so much. Now take a look at February below. February is traditionally a heavy rainfall month for us, but as you can see we were pretty parched.



And March, below. I expressed the opinion around early March right here in this blog that we'd still recover a normal rainfall based on a purely statistical look at typical rainfall. I was wrong.

And April. More of the same:

Lather, rinse, repeat until we get to today and start talking about drought.

You could argue that local rainfall doesn't matter too much since we get lots of water from the State Water Project. That's true, but the Sierra snowpack, which started out normal to high, didn't last due to warmer than normal temperatures and didn't get replenished due to lack of late winter storms.

Local rainfall also matters to local streams which host wildlife, whether intended as wildlife sanctuaries or not.