Saturday essential water

1. Revival of a 1930s canal project in Canada?

That idea is simply this: Complete the original plan for the South Saskatchewan River Project by building conduits to carry precious water from Diefenbaker Lake across a much larger portion of the grainbelt — southeast into the Qu’Appelle Valley and west toward Rosetown.

Article in the Regina-Leader Post here.

Then the counter-argument:

Mr. Goodale’s proposal would triple the irrigated agriculture acreage in the province. While proponents speak of vast multiplier effects, the fact remains that most of the irrigated land currently in place in the province is used to grow grains, oilseeds and forage — dryland crops. For the past 50 years, the anticipated value-added benefits have not met expectations. The existing irrigation headworks at Lake Diefenbaker even now are not being used to their full extent. It appears unseemly to build additional irrigation infrastructure rather than concentrate on developing the existing facilities.

…and…

There is no doubt that governments need to invest for the future, including significant investments in meeting the climate change crisis. They would be wise to disregard Mr. Goodale’s proposal in doing so.

Worth a read.

2. CMIP-5 looks like CMIP-6

We analyse projected changes in climate extremes (extreme temperatures and heavy precipitation) in the multi‐model ensembles of the 5th and 6th Coupled Model Intercomparison Projects (CMIP5 and CMIP6). The results reveal close similarity between both ensembles in the regional climate sensitivity of the projected multi‐model mean changes in climate extremes, i.e. their projected changes as a function of global warming.

Article by Sonia Seneviratne and Mathias Hauser in Earth’s Future.

3. Severe storms in Texas and Oklahoma

Days of stormy weather across the southern Plains may have residents wishing for sunshine, but AccuWeather meteorologists say the week of active weather across the region isn’t over just yet. The week began with feisty storms that unleashed damaging winds and hail across the western half of the Lone Star State on Monday and spun up two EF0 tornadoes well southeast of Austin on Tuesday.

Article in Accuweather.