Hailstones from a storm in Limon, Colorado, 2010. Not really sure if it's possible to even find that rabbit hole let alone getting to the end of it :) Good luck. Photo by James St. John (flickr,Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, image cropped and resized). Thick salt deposits accumulated in the northwestern Four Corners area as the seas evaporated. Changes in atmospheric pressure during the late fall and winter can lead to an accumulation of haze. One especially alarming detail about the Calf Canyon fire is that it was originally set in January 2022. Photo by James St. John (flickr, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license). As of 2010, bark beetles in Arizona and New Mexico have affected more than twice the forest area burned by wildfires in those states. Photograph by "Cathy" (Flickr;Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical 2.0 Generic license). 2010. Cambrian trilobites from the Bright Angel Shale (Tonto Group), Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona. For example, high winter temperatures between 2000 and 2003 correlated to bark beetle outbreaks that devastated pinyon pine throughout the Southwest, leading to nearly 90% mortality at some sites in Colorado and Arizona. Photo credits: 1916 photo from USGS (public domain), 2013 photo by daveynin (flickr,Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, image resized). The cities of Aspen and Lafayette, Colorado, as well as the state of New Mexico, were early adopters of the 2030 Challenge, an effort to reduce fossil fuel use in buildings so that both new and renovated buildings would qualify as carbon neutral by the year 2030. Dark gray is land, white and light gray are submerged areas. The oceans between Gondwana and North America began to close. For example, the difference in annual mean temperature between Pikes Peak (4302 meters or 14,114 feet) and Las Animas (1188 meters or 3898 feet), only 145 kilometers (90 miles) to the southeast, is equivalent to that between Iceland and southern Florida! Left:Warm air rises. SUMMARY OF THE OUTLOOK FOR NON-TECHNICAL USERS. The geography and climate of the southwestern U.S. east of the Rocky Mountains (in other words, in the Great Plains region in Colorado and New Mexico) are nearly ideal for their formation of thunderstorms and tornados, especially in the summer. Drought continues to be quite severe over the southern Plains in Texas and Oklahoma due to hot and dry conditions. An ancient horse (Mesohippus),Eocene Florissant Fossil Beds, Teller County, Colorado. Soils associated with these floodplains testify to the extreme seasonality of rainfall during that time. Data source: NOAA, 20212Web update: April2021. For extended periods from 2002 to 2005 and from 2012 to2020, nearly the entire region was abnormally dry or even drier (see Figure 2). Download related technical information PDF, https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/DmData/DataTables.aspx, A Closer Look: Temperature and Drought in the Southwest.
How to Choose the Right Grass Seed for Your Region - Pennington Photo by Bob Wick, Bureau of Land Management (flickr, public domain). Yet this landscape actually supports a vast array of plants and animals, along with millions of people who call the Southwest home. The risk of dangerous wildfires is currently very high in parts of the Southwest. You mentioned, if I understood correctly, that a La Nina pattern during winter months leads to an increase in the North American Monsoon in late summer. We can see some hints of this relationship in my scatter-plot here. Accessed March 2021. https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/DmData/DataTables.aspx. Because warm air can hold more moisture than cool air can, convective mixing with cool air forces moisture to condense out of warm air as vapor (clouds) and precipitation. Positive values represent wetter-than-average conditions, while negative values represent drier-than-average conditions. The Southwest has a hot desert climate, at lower elevations. The full time series for precipitation and temperature values is shown in Figure 2. 2021. Brown indicates where precipitation has been less than average; green is greater than average. A blog about monitoring and forecasting El Nio, La Nia, and their impacts. Like the summer monsoons, the milder storms . (2) In fact, comparing 1955, a year with very similar total rainfall in Tucson as this year, to this year shows temperature between July 1 and August 23 were on average more than 2 degrees F warmer. Some areas were more than 2F warmer than average (see Figure 1). Despite the monsoon rainfall this year, much of the region is still in a precipitation deficit. In winter, rising temperatures have increased the number of frost-free days. Rainfall, as anyone who has read the ENSO Blog before will know, is an extremely complicated thing to predict! Since 800,000 years ago, an equilibrium has been reached between warming and cooling, with the ice caps growing and retreating primarily due to the influence of astronomical forces (i.e., the combined gravitational effects of the Earth, Sun, moon, and planets). Both fires began as prescribed burns, or fires that were set deliberately with the intention of preventing the formation of future wildfires. Water vapor animation for the afternoon of August 22, 2018 showing the monsoon circulation and thunderstorm formation (dark blue, green, dark red). The inner canyon temperatures are extreme and hot, with a lower elevation of about 2400 feet (732 meters). Mesohippusmeasured up to 70 centimeters (2 feet) at shoulder height. The more than 16 million residents of the Southwest use carbon-rich fossil fuels to provide electricity for lighting, cooling, and appliances, to fuel their transportation and industry, and to make the products they use. Winter is the driest season in New Mexico, because precipitation from eastward-traveling Pacific storms is left behind in the western mountains of Arizona and Utah. Pangaea began to break up during the Jurassic, rifting apart into continents that would drift toward their modern-day positions. Lake Mead, the lake created by the Hoover Dam, at two points in time about 21 years apart. New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado have also reduced their carbon dioxide emissions between 2008 and 2019. Colorado has a generally cool and continental climate with low humidity. Climate change in the Southwest The global rise in temperatures will affect different locations on earth in unique ways. It smoldered beneath the ground as a dormant holdover, sleeper, or zombie fire until April, when it flared up and grew into a wildfire, an almost unprecedented occurrence in the Southwest. In the Southwest, average precipitation ranges from only 34 centimeters (13.4 inches) in Utah to 39.9 centimeters (15.7 inches) in Colorado, which reflects the area's general aridity. Based on the long-term Palmer Index, drought conditions in the Southwest have varied since 1895. Summer temperatures on the South Rim, at 7000 feet (2134 meters), are especially pleasant from 50 to about 85 F (10s to 20s C). Maps modified from maps by Wade Greenberg-Brand, originally published inThe Teacher-Friendly Guide to the Earth Science of the SouthwesternUS, after figure 3 in L. Grande (2013) The Lost World of Fossil Lake. By the start of the Late Cretaceous, this inland sea, called the Western Interior Seaway, divided North America in two; the water was rich with mosasaurs, giant clams, and other marine life. Volcanic activity was strong. Figure by climate.gov. Dry air is shown in orange. The satellite loop in this post shows Gulf of Mexico moisture moving west into the monsoon region. Summer- The summer in the Southwest region is hot and desert-like. North America and Europe are part of Laurasia, and South America and Africa are part of Gondwana. This page uses Google Analytics. Fossil mammals adapted to colder temperatures are found in the Pleistocene of Colorado. In New Mexico, for example, the average difference between the daily high and low temperatures ranges from 14 to 19C (25 to 35F). Photo of USNM 166396 from the Cretaceous Atlas of Ancient Life(Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, image cropped). And yet another element of the monsoon system that needs more study to resolve. While most of the evidence for cooling at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary comes from the deep sea, fossil mammals in the Rocky Mountains show clear evidence of a change from forests to grasslands, which is associated with global cooling. Some earlier studies suggested that El Nio may be related to lower JulyAugust rainfall, and La Nia related to higher rainfall, due to large-scale atmospheric circulation changes. When you add in the sparse rain-gauge observations available in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, it becomes even more difficult to make confident statements about the effects of the monsoon and how it can be predicted. This page uses Google Analytics. Recent warming within the Southwest has been among the most rapid in the United States, and models predict that the area's climate will continue to warm. Photo by Richard Stephen Haynes (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, image resized). One controversial hypothesis proposes that an area of western Coloradoone of the islands that dotted the early Carboniferous seawas, in fact, glaciated. Zack also mentioned our good friend El Nio! Copyright 2021 Paleontological Research Institution. Precipitation has become more variable from year to year, and heavy downpours across the U.S. have increased in the last 20 years. The last glacial advance of the modern ice age peaked some 18,000 years ago. In the late Eocene, the Earth began to cool, and global temperatures fell sharply at the boundary between the Eocene and Oligocene epochs (approximately 35 million years ago), due in part to the separation of South Americas southern tip from Antarctica. In addition, temperature increases and recent drought have resulted in earlier spring snowmelt and decreased snow cover on the lower slopes of high mountains, bringing about more rapid runoff and increased flooding. Smog (haze caused by air pollution) over Salt Lake City, Utah, 2016. These oases were fed by groundwater that originated in the higher country of what is now western Colorado. Photograph by Bill Morrow (Flickr;Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license). 2. The monsoon starts to develop in Mexico in June, and moves into the U.S. Southwest in July. Is the tropical storm season done for this part of the country? The thicker line is a nine-year weighted average. Credits: Most of the text on this page comes from "Climate of the Southwestern US" by Ingrid H. H. Zabel, Judith T. Parrish, and Andrielle N. Swaby, chapter 8 in The Teacher-Friendly Guide to the Earth Science of the Southwestern US, edited by Andrielle N. Swaby, Mark D. Lucas, and Robert M. Ross (published in 2016 by the Paleontological Research Institution; currently out of print).
Climate of the United States - Wikipedia Low annual precipitation, clear skies, and year-round warm climate over much of the Southwest are due in large part to a quasi-permanent subtropical high-pressure ridge over the region. Fall- The fall in the Southwest region is warm. In southern New Mexico, Pleistocene fossil mammals are found that now live at higher elevations in the mountains of northern New Mexico, indicating cooler temperatures and more available moisture in the area during the late Pleistocene. Large lakes covered parts of northern Utah and Colorado. Average annual preciptiation for the southwestern U.S. These changes threaten economic productivity, public health, and the sustainability of Indigenous communities.
AccuWeather's 2021 US Summer Forecast | AccuWeather The Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary at Trinidad Lake State Park, Las Animas County, Colorado. The Palmer Index is calculated from precipitation and temperature measurements at weather stations, and has been used widely for many years. These deposits, including the Navajo Sandstone, are responsible for spectacular scenery in the national parks and recreation areas of northernmost Arizona and southern Utah. This chart shows annual values of the Palmer Drought Severity Index, averaged over six states in the Southwest (Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah). The average amount of precipitation for the United States is 85.6 centimeters (33.7 inches). The Southwest is also definable, to an extent, by environmental conditions - primarily aridity.
Climate Prediction Center - Seasonal Outlook - National Oceanic and Green areas mean drought is likely to end. Trees killed by bark beetles at Cameron Pass, Colorado, 2011. Agua Caliente solar farm, Maricopa County, Arizona. Since then carbon dioxide emissions have been on a downward trend. The globe about 485 million years ago, near the Cambrian-Ordovician boundary.
Present Climate of the Southwestern US He pointed out that ENSO does influence Pacific tropical storms, which can supply moisture to the monsoon. Forecasts had all of this widespread flash flooding. Photo by Archaeopoda (Wikimedia Commons,Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, image cropped, resized, and labeled). Center:As warm air rises, cool air sinks. Reconstruction created using basemap from thePALEOMAP PaleoAtlas for GPlatesand the PaleoData Plotter Program, PALEOMAP Project by C. R. Scotese (2016); map annotations by Jonathan R. Hendricks & Elizabeth J. Hermsen for PRI's[emailprotected]project (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0license).
Southwest | National Climate Assessment Average temperatures found in the Southwest tend to decrease northward, which is largely the influence of latitude and elevation.
Photo by Bigmikebmw (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, image cropped). The Southwest's Triassic to Jurassic dune deposits are some of the most extensive in the world, and the dune field that existed during the Jurassic may be the largest in Earth history. There is a rich marine fossil record from the areas between these islands. Four of western North America's major watersheds lie within its boundaries: the Colorado River basin, the Rio Grande basin, the Sacramento-San Joaquin watershed, and most of the Great Basin. Since 1980, tree mortality in forests and woodlands across the Southwest has been higher and more extensive than at any time during the previous 90 years. The average annual temperature in most of the Southwest is predicted to rise 2.2 to 5.5C (4 to 10F) by 2100. Left photoandright photoby NPS/Michael Quinn (Grand Canyon National Park via flickr,Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, images cropped and resized). Ill be back on my regular beat in a couple of weeks with the September ENSO update. Left imageandright imageby NickLongrich (Wikimedia Commons,Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, images cropped and resized). Submitted by rebecca.lindsey on Thu, 09/30/2021 - 10:13. Climate models project a significant increase in the number of days over 95F per year across the Southeast. (2019)Biology Letters15: 20190114(Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, images cropped, reconfigured, resized, and relabeled). Soil moisture, ground water, and streamflow are part of Drought Monitor calculations (Figure 2), and they are all sensitive to human activities. Across New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, summer rains originate from moisture brought into the area from the Gulf of Mexico. Photos by Lauren Dauphin, NASA Earth Observatory (used following NASA's image use policy). Photo by James Bo Insogna. All rights reserved. Ordovician deposits across the Southwest indicate warm, shallow seas rich in invertebrate life.
Climate | Arizona State Climate Office Also extreme dryness which means days & weeks on end without rain. The number of days with temperatures above 35C (95F) and nights above 24C (75F) has been steadily increasing since 1970, and the warming is projected to continue. A value between -2 and -3 indicates moderate drought, -3 to -4 is severe drought, and -4 or below indicates extreme drought. :https://earthathome.org/de/what-is-climate/, Digital Encyclopedia of Earth Science: Evidence for and causes of recent climate change:https://earthathome.org/de/recent-climate-change/, Digital Encyclopedia of Earth Science: Climate change mitigation: https://earthathome.org/de/climate-change-mitigation/, Digital Encyclopedia of Earth Science: Climate change adaptation: https://earthathome.org/de/climate-change-adaptation/, [emailprotected]: Quick guides & FAQ: Climate and Energy:https://earthathome.org/quick-faqs/#climate, [emailprotected]: Here on Earth: Introduction to Climate: https://earthathome.org/hoe/climate/. Large lakes formed in low areas, and the Southwests most striking ice age feature was Lake Bonneville, a massive pluvial lake that covered much of Utah. Photo by Stefan Klein (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, image cropped and resized). NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). The causes of specific weather events such as tornados and severe thunderstorms are incredibly complex, although climate change has enhanced some correlated factors, such as increased wind speed and an unstable atmosphere. The desert experiences large temperature extremes, especially between day and night; daily temperature may change as much as 15C (60F) during the driest parts of the year. Sand dunes started to become widespread. After the end-Cretaceous bolide impact, the climate may have cooled briefly, but it soon rebounded to a warmer state. NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin (NASA Earth Observatory,used following NASA's image use policy). This may be due to the growth of solar energy, and voluntary commitments to reduce emissions made by large utility companies in the state. July 1August 22, 2021 precipitation shown as a percent of the average July 1August 22, based on 19792020. Shallow seas invaded the continent, ultimately covering the whole area until the late Carboniferous.
Temperature and Precipitation | CLIMAS For many of us, the word monsoon conjures images of heavy rain lasting for months. A shift in plant type to those better adapted to drier conditions further suggests a change in climate during the Permian.
Southwest | U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit Higher atmospheric moisture content has also been correlated with an increased incidence of tornados and winter storms.
Climate of the Southwestern United States Earth@Home The highest point in these mountains has a relief of 1572 meters (5157 feet) over the surrounding landscape, and the mountains are tall enough to receive snowfall. Secure .gov websites use HTTPS While the state is generally arid, its high western mountains experience more precipitation each year than the desert southwest and the high northeastern plateau do. Copyright 2021 Paleontological Research Institution. Although on the western edge of the North American Monsoon, California plant geography indicates it makes a large contribution to the states southern flora. Carbon dioxide emissions in Arizona rose through the last three decades of the 20th century and reached a peak in 2008. (Going forward, to avoid having to say northwestern Mexico, Arizona, and New Mexico over and over, Ill refer to this area as the monsoon region.). Pleistocene Lake Bonneville. 4. The current drought outlooks expect that the drought in Arizona and New Mexico will improve in the short term, but persist.