Second century megadrought in the Rio Grande headwaters, Colorado: How unusual was medieval drought?

Second century megadrought in the Rio Grande headwaters, Colorado: How unusual was medieval drought?

[1] A new tree‐ring record from living and remnant bristlecone pine (Pinus aristata) wood from the headwaters region of the Rio Grande River, Colorado is used in conjunction with other regional records to evaluate periods of unusually severe drought over the past two millennia (B.C. 268 to A.D. 2009). Our new record contains a multi‐century period of unusual dryness between 1 and 400 A.D., incl...

Science in colorado: the second century begins.

Evaluating MODIS snow products for modelling snowmelt runoff: Case study of the Rio Grande headwaters

Snow-covered area (SCA) is a key variable in the Snowmelt-Runoff Model (SRM) and in other models for simulating discharge from snowmelt. Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM), Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM + ) or Operational Land Imager (OLI) provide remotely sensed data at an appropriate spatial resolution for mapping SCA in small headwater basins, but the temporal resolution of the data is low and may...

Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico

The native population collapse in 16th century Mexico was a demographic catastrophe with one of the highest death rates in history. Recently developed tree-ring evidence has allowed the levels of precipitation to be reconstructed for north central Mexico, adding to the growing body of epidemiologic evidence and indicating that the 1545 and 1576 epidemics of cocoliztli (Nahuatl for "pest") were ...

Fractional snow cover in the Colorado and Rio Grande basins , 1995 – 2002

[1] A cloud-masked fractional snow-covered area (SCA) product gridded at 1 km was developed from the advanced very high resolution radiometer for the Colorado River and upper Rio Grande basins for 1995–2002. Cloud cover limited SCA retrievals on any given 1-km pixel to on average once per week. There were sufficient cloud-free scenes to map SCA over at least part of the basins up to 21 days per...