Ozone up again on the Front Range

Looks like ozone levels are climbing back up again in the Front Range, and the window of attainment is closing. The increased pollution is probably due to several things - more oil and gas wells in Adams and Weld counties, scraping the barrel of what's left out there, and more drivers with their more driving. Hurry Fast Tracks!

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New report on forest health in Colorado

This post was the last one I was working on before I got really busy. It's a it dated, but here it is anyway.

You can download the report in a PDF (direct link) here.

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A new report gives the low down on the range of beetles devouring Colorado's conifers, as well as declining aspen.

Some 643,000 acres of lodgepole forest - about 42 percent of Colorado's total - were infested last year by mountain pine beetles, said Jen Chase, lead author of the 2006 Report on the Health of Colorado's Forests.

But the damage went beyond lodgepoles. Ponderosa pines also suffered from mountain pine beetles in 2006, along with:

• 138,000 acres of aspens declining from a mysterious affliction.

• 68,000 acres of spruce infested with bark beetles.

• 372,000 acres of subalpine fir attacked by Western balsam bark beetles, root diseases and other unknown factors.

• 19,000 acres of piñon pines infested with ips beetles.

• 93,000 acres of Douglas fir, true fir and spruce hit by Western spruce budworm.

As for the causes:

"A lot of these outbreaks got kicked off because of the drought, but forest conditions have allowed them to keep expanding," said U.S. Forest Service entomologist Bob Cain. "We have pretty uniform conditions of older, denser forests across the state, which are susceptible to the bark beetles," he said. "So even though the drought conditions have improved, the outbreaks are continuing."

Which sounds to me like he might be referring to those "decadent" old growth stands. I'm not convinced that any new logging regime is going to change this situation. From what I've seen, when the trees, living or dead, are logged, they come back in the same, dense, single age stands to which Bob Cain refers. And then we have a never ending cycle until the seed stock is gone.

Moreover, no reference to global warming in the article, which with warming temperatures has reduced the winter freezes that kept the beetles in check. Nothing to be done about that for a long time.

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2006 El Niño fakes out Colorado forecasters

Here's the summary from the article which details the unusual winter we've had in Colorado so far.

An El Niño weather system arrived in the Pacific Ocean last fall, warming a stretch of water west of Peru's coast.

The last seven El Niños brought winters that were warmer and drier than usual in Colorado, with a few heavier snowstorms in the fall and spring.

This time, January was the eighth-coldest on record in Denver, and the monthly snowfall was twice the normal tally - nearly 16 inches instead of about 8, said Matt Kelsch, a meteorologist with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

There has been measurable snow on the ground in the Front Range for 50 consecutive days, the third- longest period on record, Kelsch said.

This season's El Niño was a typical one, "moderate sized, fairly vanilla, really," Wolter said. "But the impacts have been anything but normal in this hemisphere."

Feeding the almost weekly snows in December and January was an odd constellation of forces, he said, including a warmer- than-usual western Pacific Ocean and storms that moved in from the northwest, not the southwest, as they normally do.

And for those warming skeptics:

The recent cold and snow do not mean global warming has skipped Colorado, he said.

While the background climate is warming, temperatures and precipitation will always bounce around the norm, Hoerling said.

The Longmont Times-Call chimes in:

Mike Gillespie, a snow-survey supervisor for the NRCS, said the state has had an unusual trend of large snowstorms hitting the Front Range and Eastern Plains instead of the Western Slope.

“Normally, our storm track comes into the northwest, and this year it’s been coming around the backside,” he said.