Hunger in the California heartland
Drought, water limits lead to soaring unemployment
Idled farmworkers are searching for food in the nation's most prolific agricultural region, where a double blow of drought and a court-ordered cutback of water supplies has caused hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.
This bedraggled town is struggling with an unemployment rate that city officials say is 40 percent and rising. This mo
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Ice melting across globe at accelerating rate, NASA says
Between 1.5 trillion and 2 trillion tons of ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska has melted at an accelerating rate since 2003, according to NASA scientists, in the latest signs of what they say is global warming. ... read more >>
FAO says Africa needs massive water investment
Africa needs investment of 65 billion dollars over the next 20 years if food production is to keep pace with the rapid expansion of its population, a UN agency said on Monday. ... read more >>
Scientists say quick action needed to reduce Gulf dead zone
NEW ORLEANS — Scientists have issued a report urging immediate government action to reduce urban and Midwest farmland runoff blamed for feeding an 8,000-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, an oxygen-deprived pool of water that has grown alarmingly off the mouth of the Mississippi River.
A report by the National Research Council, a scientific and technology non-profit institution creat
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Lake Baikal May Hold Secret to Oil Origins
From Russia Today - Scientists of the Limnological Institute which studies lakes and other internal waters at the Russian Academy of Sciences, have been studying oil formation processes in Lake Baikal for years and are hoping the new Mir submersibles will help them to better understand the nature of black gold. They believe that oil is formed from fossils and organic elements at the bottom the la ... read more >>
Obama's Transition Team Studies Investment in Water Efficiency
The Alliance for Water Efficiency advised President-Elect Barack Obama's transition team about the employment potential and economic benefits of broad investments in water efficiency. AWE has prepared a position paper titled, "Transforming Water: Water Efficiency as Stimulus and Long-Term Investment". ... read more >>
HydroPlatform
For modelers: HydroPlatform was just announced at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in SF. It looks promising...I'd keep an eye on this.
HydroPlatform is an open-source software platform for water resource management network models. The program manages and displays model inputs and outputs. Models are run externally and independently, uncoupled from the user interface and d
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Agricultural Water Management : Effects of partial root-zone irrigation on the nitrogen absorption and utilization of maize
To investigate the dynamic change of plant nitrogen (N) absorption and accumulation from different root zones under the partial root-zone irrigation (PRI), maize plants were raised in split-root containers and irrigated on both halves of the container (conventional irrigation, CI), on one side only (fixed partial root-zone irrigation, FPRI), or alternatively on one of two sides (alternate partial ... read more >>
A blogger’s perspective on the Pacific Institute’s agricultural conservation report
From the On the Public Record blog, this blogger discusses flaws in the Pacific Institute's report on ag conservation, addressing specifically the complexities of irrigation and the section crop-shifting. ... read more >>
An Overview of the State of the World’s Fresh and Marine Waters
Highlights from assessment activities over the past two decades, used to establish present and future water trends, reveal that:
1. Freshwater resources are unevenly distributed, with much of the water located far from human populations. Many of the world’s largest river basins run through thinly populated regions. There are an estimated 263 international rivers, covering 45.3% of the land-sur
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