Solar Insolation in the West

Pellston, Michigan 2010 Climate

The average yearly data were obtained from NOAA's climatology servers and this year (or any year's) values were from NOAA's climate data online service. Choose Surface Data, Global Summary, then Country: USA, then choose a state and finally a station and year range.

UPDATE:  In 2016, the New York Times implemented this visualization.

Environmental Degradation in Haiti

Google maps has high-quality satellite imagery of Haiti, and reading remote-sensing images is a big part of my job as an ecologist so I decided to take a brief fly-over to see what it looks like. What immediately called out to me was the widespread and obvious degradation of the rivers and streams; the images of Haiti are consistent with a highly disturbed landscape. Most unconfined rivers in Haiti appear braided, meandering over large areas of bare ground.

These rivers are rapidly aggrading (depositing sediment), most likely due to excess sediment from erosion in the uplands. Of course, natural disturbances such as hurricanes, forest fires, and perhaps even earthquakes, could cause similar river channel adjustments. Braided channels may be a natural response to naturally high-erosional areas. Here is such a stream in Southern California:

If Haiti had a Californian/Mediterranean climate instead of a Carribean climate, these levels of disturbance could be explained naturally. Instead, these high-disturbance, silt-choked rivers and streams are likely better explained by human overuse and consequent environmental degradation: "Haiti...was largely self-sufficient in grain 40 years ago. In the years since, though, it has lost nearly all its forests and much of its topsoil, forcing the country to import more than half of its grain." Brown, Lester R. "Could food shortages bring down civilization?" Scientific American. May 2009. p. 50




Closeup view of wide, unvegetated floodplain in Haiti:

Of course, Haiti is not the only place with altered erosion visible from space. In fact, the images above are becoming the norm across much of the world. Even richer countries have impacted rivers, but some, such as Costa Rica, also have many rivers that are allowed to remain in their unimpacted, natural state. This is what tropical rivers should look like when they have a natural disturbance regime:

A New Conception of My Home-Watershed: the Gila River Basin

It took me three years of living and traveling extensively around Tucson to understand the local watershed. I grasped early on the basin and range topography of parallel North-South mountain ranges, but these ridges served to confuse rather than clarify the overall drainage, since I did not know how the meandering rivers and dry washes of the bottomlands connected. Some went north, others flowed south. Where was the continental divide? Where did they meet the sea?

It was only by fortuitous circumstance that the last year found me exploring the full scope of an area I finally recognized as my home watershed. I new conception of the Gila River Basin emerged from these vast peregrinations, a new understanding of the lay of the land and a meshing of medium and large scale aspects:

The Sonoran desert in Arizona exists in the Gila Basin, surrounded on three sides (north, east, and south) by concentric rings of grassland valleys and mesas, woodland hills and forested mountains. The Gila, which rises on the continental divide to the east (in NM), is joined by tributaries from the north and south, representing, respectively, the Mogollon Rim divide and another divide which roughly approximates the U.S./Mexico border.

This general schema is interrupted, of course, by the basic and range, which further divides ecotones and watersheds, creating a kind of comb effect wherein numerous drainages flow parallel before their confluence with the Gila. The Gila itself is also indistinct, since it virtually disappears in an amorphous wash in the middle of its basin. And, since it flows through sparsely inhabited parts of the countryside, it is even easier to ignore its central role in ordering the landform. Most people living in the large metropolitan areas of Phoenix and Tucson do not realize their place along the cusp of the Sonoran lowlands, or the importance of the placements of their cities at the ecotone divide between grassland and desert, where rivers [used to ] bring water from the mountains before evaporating in the desert. [Theoretically,] the Gila eventually flows into the Colorado, before that crosses the U.S. Mexico border, reaches its estuary, and flows into the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). The Colorado rises from the western rocky mountains and the high colorado plateau to the north of the gila basin. To the south, in Mexico, streams flow directly off the Sierra Madre into the Sea of Cortez, without joining together in a large basin such as the Gila. To the east, on the other side of the continental divide, are the Chihuahan desert and the Rio Grand. These areas combined form the Southwest, and a large part of three out of four of the N. American deserts.

You remember the San Pedro

You remember driving up out of the Santa Cruz valley from Nogales through hills and then up over a wide country of wineries where you exclaim "oh I didn't know Arizona could be like this!" We hike along the Babocomari river under the trees and watch the Great Horned Owls. The Rincons, the Mustang and Whetstone, the Burro, the Huachuca, the Canelo hills, and the Santa Ritas and Empire Mountains are all arrayed round about; the town of Elgin, the sun and the full moon and the purple-tinged shadow of the Earth.

But what you don't know is that if you follow the river you meander around the Mustang mountains and leave them standing still behind you like some kind of massive eroded stonehenge....and then you enter a great valley with cities and people and mountains all around. This is one of the last great river-valleys before the continental divide, one of the last surviving Arizona rivers, the San Pedro.

But this green ribbon snaking through an ocean of desert scrub and cactus is already dead. The aquafer has been drained and it is only a matter of time before this valley, like its neighbors, becomes dust and bones. "Man's ego is going to fill his pockets, and the river be damned." (ibid)

For more information and maps (though not a solution to the problem) see the Upper San Pedro Partnership

Places to Go

TREKING

• English or Scottish Coast (B&B Inns)
• Japanese Shinto Meditation Trails
• Switzerland Alps
• Kauai North (and west) Coast

LOCAL

• Bisbee: Cafe Roka five-star eating in abandoned cobblestone town-come-artist colony in SE Arizona
  
• Picacho del Diablo: San Jacinto visible 200 miles N?

ISLANDS

• New Caledonia (makes a triangle with Australia and New Zealand)
• Vanuatu: Cargo cult and volcanoes
  
• Of course, the opposite spot on the world: Heard and McDonald Island

SPECIAL INTEREST

• Dornach, Switzerland: Goetheanum