Mountain snowpack stores a significant quantity of water in the western US, accumulating during the wet season and melting during the dry summers and supplying much of the water used for irrigated agriculture, and municipal and industrial uses. Updating our earlier work published in 2005, we find that with 14 additional years of data, over 90% of snow monitoring sites with long records across the western US now show declines, of which 33% are significant (vs. 5% expected by chance) and 2% are significant and positive (vs. 5% expected by chance). Declining trends are observed across all months, states, and climates, but are largest in spring, in the Pacific states, and in locations with mild winter climate. We corroborate and extend these observations using a gridded hydrology model, which also allows a robust estimate of total western snowpack and its decline. We find a large increase in the fraction of locations that posted decreasing trends, and averaged across the western US, the decline in average April 1 snow water equivalent since mid-century is roughly 15-30% or 25-50 km 3 , comparable in volume to the West's largest man-made reservoir, Lake Mead.

In response to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments instituted “stay-at-home” orders to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. The resulting changes in work and life routines had the potential to substantially perturb typical patterns of urban water use. We present here an analysis of how these pandemic responses affected California’s urban water consumption. Using water demand modeling that fuses an integrated water use database, we first simulated the water use in a business-as-usual (non-pandemic) scenario for essentially all urban areas in California. We then subtracted the business-as-usual water use from the actual use to isolate the changes caused solely by the pandemic response. We found that the pandemic response decreased California’s urban water use by 7.9%, which can be largely attributed to an 11.2% decrease in the commercial, industrial, and institutional sector that more than offset a 1.4% increase in the residential sector. The influence of the stay-at-home practices on urban water use is slightly stronger than the combined influences of all non-pandemic factors. This study covers both metropolitans and suburbs; therefore, the results could also be useful for analysis of the impacts of COVID-19 on water use in other urban areas.

Washington State experienced widespread drought in 2015 and the largest burned area in the observational record, attributable in part to exceptionally low winter snow accumulation and high summer temperatures. We examine 2015 drought severity in the Cascade and Olympic mountains relative to the historical climatology (1950-present) and future climate projections (mid-21st century) for a mid-range global greenhouse gas emissions scenario. Although winter precipitation was near normal, the regional winter temperature anomaly was +2.1 • C (+2.0 ) in 2015, consistent with projections of a +2.3 • C (+2.2 ) temperature change and near normal precipitation in the future, relative to the climatology. April 1 snow water equivalent in 2015, −325 mm (−1.5 ), and the future, −252 mm (−1.1 ), were substantially lower than the climatology. Wildfire potential, as indicated by dead fuel moisture content, was higher in 2015 than mid-21st century mean projections. In contrast to most historical droughts, which have been driven by precipitation deficits, our results suggest that 2015 is a useful analog of typical conditions in the Pacific Northwest by the mid-21st century.

In the summer of 2015, Eastern Washington State (east of 122°W) experienced over 2000 fires that burned a record amount of area, saw the deaths of three firefighters, and caused hazardous air quality throughout much of the region. The area burned during the 2015 fire season (∼471 000 hectares) was over three times that of the next largest year in the previous 32 years. We examine Eastern Washington's 2015 fire season in the context of the historical fire record, which is available from satellite remote sensing observations for the past 32 years. We explore the relationship between fire activity and physical climatic factors, including temperature and precipitation, fuel characteristics, such as dry fuel moisture, historical land cover change, forest health, and fire behavior, such as ignition and propagation. Summer 2015 was anomalously warm in Eastern Washington-nearly 1°C warmer than the previous record warm year and 1.4°C warmer than the 32-year climatology. It followed a near-record warm winter with anomalously low spring snowpack, whereas winter precipitation in 2014-2015 was near normal. We find that the extreme 2015 fire year was not attributable to any one physical factor, but rather was related to a combination of anomalously dry and warm summer conditions, a lightning storm in mid-August, early propagation and growth through grasslands, and high grassland fuel loadings caused by anomalous growth in the preceding late winter and spring. At the local level, prediction of the anomalous 2015 burned area is not associated with any single variable; however, the combination of conditions, especially climate and fuel loads, are likely to recur in the future.

In this paper I hope to explain the reasons for developing a method to provide the individual with tools to cope with failure at an early stage of his life; additionally, the general principles of that method will be formulated. Obviously, the basic objective is ultimately aimed at conditioning the child's thinking towards development of different attitudes in relation to failure situations. Success of the method, in the long run, depends upon the repetition of similar techniques, at least during the first years of the child's schooling. Thus we tend to believe that if we ‘instil’ in the child the proposed way of relating, he will then be able to cope not only with failure in the future but also with pressures exerted by unskilled teachers in school, who may use failure as a threat. As an additional alternative there is proposed a general model of treating children who have not been trained at an earlier stage to deal with failure within the school framework.