A very wet Thanksgiving

Right now two of my colleagues and a bunch of our advanced undergraduates and graduate students are on a rainforest ecology field trip in NE Costa Rica at the La Selva biological station.  Usually the station provides a quite magnificent dinner for all the gringo visitors, but unfortunately they are all about to get very wet, and when you say that for this place, that's saying a lot. Hurricane Otto is bearing down on them, and while it is not a major storm in the sense of wind, the amount of rain they could get in the next 48 hours could be amazing, and this really can put the field research on hold.  TPP wishes them well.  Our previous course record was 444 mm of rainfall in 8 days, and with 18-24" predicted for their area, they may set a new record.  Yea! Go team go! It's happened before as the image shows; the flooded area is usually high and dry several meters above the river.  Fortunately the labs and cabinas are much higher still.  

The mid-west is wet

Drove across northern Missouri yesterday to get to KC.  The overall impression is one of a giant mud puddle.  All in all pretty wet places were getting inches of rainfall, and not all of it is coming down gently.  In general this is quite a depressing and annoying weather pattern this year, and quite different from the weather of a year ago.  Our field work is suffering, our gardens are suffering, and the grass is growing.  Presently the prairie canopy is at about 1 meter, and we had to add our tall flags to plots so that they can be found fairly easily at least for another month or so.  Does TPP have to mention that one of our treatments is nutrient augmentation?  Oh, will this make things grow?  Oh, yes!  Our soil is on the heavy side and when it's wet it gets sticky, and you just shouldn't mess with it, but you still want to get some stuff planted.  The windows of opportunity have been few and brief.  It's been easier to keep up with mowing the lawn, and that's been hard enough.  Farmers aren't just dealing with wet soil; they've got flooding.  A lot of flood plain agricultural fields are way too wet for planting, or flooded, and if they have been planted, they will probably need to be replanted, but it's getting late in the season to plant maize.  Because of the demand and the price, maize has been plenty popular, so lots of frugal farmers have bought their seed already to get a discount, so it won't be easy, or cost effective, to switch to soybeans.  Planting early on flood plains is a bit risky, but the USA's crop insurance program basically assured farmers of getting 80% of their anticipated sale no matter what, so while everyone likes the idea of insurance to iron out the ups and downs, the current program seems to encourage risky agricultural behavior.  These are the things you think about when driving across the great midwestern farm belt.  Also observed some very poor conservation where rather steep fields were plowed without any contouring or other erosion suppressing practices, and torrents of reddish-brown water were washing off of them.  Some farmers need a dope slap; why they treat soil like everyone treats water, as if it were an inexaustable resource. In one area the wind preceding a storm was kicking up clouds of dust, top soil, and even in flat places like these fine soil erodes at a rate of 5 tons per acre, yet many people fail to believe this is happening.  And then another line of storms moves in, and you begin to listen to the radio in case of tornado warmings.  About the time you think perhaps things aren't being so violent, you pass a wooded area by a river where the tops of all the trees have been snapped off, recently.  So it was a bit of a surprise when the sky turned a funny color this afternoon, blue.  Delightful, as the heat and humity soared.  Welcome to the great midwest!

Post-hoc thoughts on Sandy

No question about it, Hurricane Sandy socked the greater NY-NJ metro area good and solid.  There are a couple of real good points to consider.  Notice how fragile our modern infrastructure actually is.  There are still people without electricity, and a robust public transport system was shut down so completely bicycles where the most reliable form of transportation.  Naturally you feel bad for people whose houses were damaged or destroyed, and whose belongings were lost.  Tragic, but it wasn't actually a "natural disaster".  It was a human error in planning, pure human hubris, to allow people to build in low-lying, flood prone areas, on stormy coasts, and such.  You're living on borrowed time.  The same thing happens out here in the midwest.  Rivers flood towns, farms, and houses, and it's a natural disaster.  Well, it's natural OK, but you built your towns and houses on a flood plain.  What did you expect!  As the human population grows, more and more people are going to "get in the way" of natural events, so more and bigger damage to our trappings of civilization are to be expected.  Raise sea level just a meter from global warming, and the number of people potentially affected increases dramatically.  All of our edifices have such a feeling of firmness, solidness, and permanence, yet all are so fragile.  If the electricity stays out for even longer, you end up with high-rise tombs.  Expect more of the same, but it's hard to get creatures with short lives, short memories, and even shorter attention spans to look for long-term solutions.  We praise politicians for their reactions, but really their failure to be proactive was the cause of much of the destruction.   

Pretty ironic, pretty funny - Ark damaged by flooding

Production of a new movie "Noah" (I always hear "This is the Lord, Noah!" spoken in Bill Cosby's voice.) was halted in Oyster Bay, NY, because of, yes, you guessed it, flooding!  Apparently their 405 foot long Ark replica (how big is that in cubits?), just like the one not found over and over again on Mt. Ararat, isn't very sea worthy.  TPP wants to see the part where Emma Watson (guess she needs some post-Potter work) loads two of each kind of dinosaur (or is dinosaur a kind?) into their quarters along with enough fern foliage hay (what do you think grew in Jurassic park?) to keep them fed for 40 days and nights, and then some.   

Floods & flood plains

The Army Corps of Engineers are not my favorite bureaucracy; worst land lords ever, but that's another story. Lately though they had a choice to make about flood control and neither was going to prove popular or be without a cost. All our rain up here north goes south via the Mississippi River drainage, and near southern Illinois flooding is frequent because of the confluence of several major rivers: Illinois, Missouri, and Ohio all enter the Mississippi. The rapidly rising water was threatening Cairo (pronounced "kayro") Illinois, a thriving metropolis of two to three thousand people. To prevent that city from flooding, the Corps broke a down stream levee on the Missouri side flooding thousands and thousands of acres of thinly populated largely agricultural land. This is a hard equation to solve, but probably the agricultural land, former flood plains bottom land, is the more valuable, but Cairo would impact more people, but not so many that the choice is obvious. Other than a couple of BBQ places, there isn't much to Cairo that cries out for saving, but some people call it home. So the Phactor will endeavor to make both parties feel better. No one should have built a city there nor decided live on flood plains either. The land isn't really yours; it was borrowed from the rivers, and at times like this, the river needs it back. And therein is the whole problem; human intervention has created this problem by not "going with the flow". Back in the old days settlements along the Mississippi were either on bluffs or way back across the flood plains on the lower shoulder of the river valley; remnants of them can still be found in places. Nice fertile soil out there, washed down from up here, but dang it, you can't farm it when it floods. And it was tough getting to those river boats for transportation and commerce, so all those nice levees were built, and the wetlands were drained, and people decided to live on the bottom lands or the river shore for a matter of convenience. Well, things aren't so convenient now, but it was a fool's dream that you could permanently steal land from a big river that built the land in the 1st place. So while it's not nice for the individuals whose lives and livelihoods are disrupted, it's all the result of poor choices made some time ago. The lowest and most flood prone areas, especially those upstream, should be restored to wet land areas that will act like sponges, slowing the flow, and taking the pressure off the main channel, and of course, many organisms would benefit whose populations have suffered from the loss of wetland habitat. But we're talking about the Army Corps, the same brainiacs that channelized the everglades and Mississippi delta. Now they got a plumbing problem a lot worse than the one in my old house with the result they must make no-win choices. So think they'll go for longer term solutions, or just put a bandage back in place?

April showers bring floods

This April nearly concluded will go down in the record books as the rainiest April in over 50 years. Rainy also means cloudy, and cloudy also means cool, and this translates into general depression and miserable field conditions. Early spring perennials do well in this type of weather as do early plantings of trees and shrubs, and any transplantings, if you could find a day or two without rain to garden. And of course April is windy. That's spring here in the upper midwest. But it is without question that such weather slows down growth and flowering, so many flowering events in our gardens are running 7 to 20 days behind last year. While the mild winter and late spring means that some shrubs have burst forth with some amazing flowering displays, for example, our tulip-flowered magnolia, but unfortunately rain and wind have then conspired to fore shorten their longevity. Nature gives and nature takes away, so you enjoy them while you can. The weather is affecting migratory species too, and several avian visitors usually seen April have yet to arrive. Maybe they're taking Amtrak. As a natural consequence of flood plain levees and rain up here, down stream, especially where the Missouri, Illinois, and Ohio join the Mississippi, it floods. It always has, but without wide flood plains to spread the water out, and wet lands to absorb, reduce, and slow down the flow, the flooding tends to be sudden and catastrophic. This part of it is man made, and right now decisions are being made whether to flood farm lands or cities, but neither one should be there without being ready to deal with the consequences. Guess we can look forward to May flowers.