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This Summer Broke the World Record for the Highest Temperature Officially Recorded

/in , , /by /APby Seth Borenstein and Jamey Keaten

Earth has sweltered through its hottest Northern Hemisphere summer ever measured, with a record warm August capping a season of brutal and deadly temperatures, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Last month was not only the hottest August scientists ever recorded by far with modern equipment, it was also the second hottest month measured, behind only July 2023, WMO and the European climate service Copernicus announced Wednesday.

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50 Tasks to Tackle in the August Garden, From Frequent Harvesting to Thoughtful Watering

/in , , /by /The San Diego Union-Tribuneby Nan Sterman

It’s summer! This is the garden’s harshest and most challenging season of the year, Southern California’s gardening equivalent to winter in most parts of the country.

Pay close attention to how much, how long and how often to water different kinds of plants in your garden.

Your goal is to water just right — not too much, not too little — for each.

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Expect a Hot, Smoky Summer in Much of America. Here’s Why You’d Better Get Used to It

/in , , /by /AP Newsby Seth Borenstein

The only break much of America can hope for anytime soon from eye-watering dangerous smoke from fire-struck Canada is brief bouts of shirt-soaking sweltering heat and humidity from a southern heat wave that has already proven deadly, forecasters say. And then the smoke will likely come back to the Midwest and East.

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Opinion: Summertime Is No Cure for the Environmental Blues

/in , , /by /The San Diego Union-Tribuneby Michael Smolens

News about the environment rarely is good these days, but a string of grim developments locally, regionally and internationally cast a particular pall over the otherwise sunny arrival of summer.

Beaches from Imperial Beach north to Coronado were closed because of sewage discharges from Tijuana. The Colorado River’s reservoirs are so low that severe water cuts are on the horizon for much of the southwestern United States. And another climate conference, this one in Germany, pretty much went nowhere.

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This Summer was California’s Driest on Record in More Than 100 years, Here’s What That Means

/in , , /by /San Francisco Chronicleby Danielle Escheverria and Yoohjun Jung
In another alarming measure of California’s historic drought, the summer months this year were the state’s driest on record since 1895, when data-gathering for the government’s standard drought index began.
The monthly average dryness for July, August and September 2021 was -6.8 on the Palmer Drought Severity Index, which indicates extreme drought. Anything below -4.0 on the Palmer scale is considered “extreme drought.” A year with normal precipitation would fall between -0.49 and 0.49 on the scale, and an “extremely wet” year would land above 4.0.

 

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Contouring Tips Help You Make the Grade

/in , , /by /Water News Network

Moving both irrigation and our limited natural rainfall through your yard into storage areas via the use of various landscaping features borrow Mother Nature’s engineering. This is especially important during hot, dry summer months. If your yard is perfectly flat, you must move soil and features around to create more water-retaining contour areas.

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Water is Disappearing in the West – and Not Just During the Summer

/in , , /by /CNN by Hannah Gard

Skiers and snowboarders pray for snow so they can shred the slopes. Climatologists and hydrologists have an entirely different and more critical reason to cross their fingers for the “white gold.”

The West’s historic drought has many impacts, including water shortages, more severe wildfire seasons and unprecedented heat waves, to name a few. Intense droughts are a result of many factors, one of which scientists have recently began to analyze with more scrutiny: snow drought.
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Drought Ravages Californias Reservoirs Ahead of Hot Summer

/in , , /by /AP Newsby Adam Beam

Each year Lake Oroville helps water a quarter of the nation’s crops, sustain endangered salmon beneath its massive earthen dam and anchor the tourism economy of a Northern California county that must rebuild seemingly every year after unrelenting wildfires.

But now the mighty lake — a linchpin in a system of aqueducts and reservoirs in the arid U.S. West that makes California possible — is shrinking with surprising speed amid a severe drought, with state officials predicting it will reach a record low later this summer.

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Northern Hemisphere had its Warmest Summer Ever, NOAA says

/in , , /by /CBS Newsby Peter Martinez

The Northern Hemisphere had its hottest summer on record in 2020, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Monday. Scientists from NOAA also said that 2020 is likely to be one of the five warmest years on record, and that last month was the second-warmest August on record.

NOAA said the 10 warmest Augusts have all occurred since 1998 and the five warmest Augusts have occurred since 2015. North America had its warmest August on record, with a temperature departure from average of +2.74 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NOAA.

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An Extraordinary Summer of Crises for California’s Farmworkers

/in , , /by /National Geographicby Alejandra Borunda

Rosa Villegas woke up at two in the morning on a late August Monday to make her way to the lettuce fields in California’s south Salinas Valley, where she was scheduled to start bagging heads of romaine at 4 a.m. The sky overhead wasn’t its usual dark, star-dotted self as she walked to her car. Instead, it glowed a sickly red, colored by the fires burning on the flanks of the Santa Lucia mountains, just a few miles west.

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