Tropical storm Bret, a sluggish but well-formed weather system, spun to life off Florida’s east coast Sunday night, but it posed no threat to South Florida.
The storm, the second of the 2011 season, is unlikely to generate any real relief from drought conditions in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast.
Bret formed just north of the northwest Bahamas, bringing heavy downpours to the islands and whipping up high surf conditions with its winds of up to 40 mph. As the slow-moving storm is expected to slog north and toward the northeast Monday afternoon, it is projected to drift further to sea.
“We could see some showers, but most of the heavier rains and storms are mostly over the Bahamas,” said Dave Ross, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Miami.
While Bahamian authorities issued a tropical storm watch for Grand Bahama Island and the Abaco Islands Sunday, “severe” drought conditions remained in western areas of Martin and St. Lucie counties and an “extreme” drought lingered in eastern areas of those counties.
Although the water level at Lake Okeechobee, the principal source of irrigation and drinking water for the region, continued to show signs of recovery at 10.10 feet Sunday, it has a long way to go to avoid a water shortage in November, when the dry season begins.
Brett morphed from the season’s second tropical depression. The first, Tropical Storm Arlene, made landfall in Veracruz, Mexico, on June 30.
– Liz Balmaseda, Post staff writer
Tags: Bahamas, Tropical Storm Bret
This entry was posted on Sunday, July 17th, 2011 at 8:06 pm and is filed under 2011 season storms, Bret. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Tropical Storm Bret forms over northern Bahamas | Eye on the Storm
Drought cripples southern US farms - FT.com
Half of Dahlen Hancock’s cotton fields are dead. The other half are clinging to life.
The 5,800 acres he farms near Lubbock, Texas, are half irrigated and half at the mercy of the clouds. And the past nine months have been the driest in Texas on record.
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The Lone Star state is at the epicentre of a once-in-a-generation drought stretching from Arizona to Florida. The US’s southern underbelly is scorched like meat on a grill.
The drought has spawned wildfires, turning grasslands to ash. In Texas, the leading cotton producer in the US, 59 per cent of the cotton crop is in poor condition or worse. Harvests of hard winter wheat, prized for yeasted breads, have plummeted in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas as yields and acreage contracted. Ranchers cannot feed their cattle on parched pastures.
Mr Hancock, a fourth-generation farmer, says the cotton seeds he planted on his 3,000 dryland acres never germinated. “All I see is dry, barren farmland. The weeds really haven’t even grown,” he says.
His irrigated crop is also “right on the edge”, as temperatures in Lubbock have hovered near 38C all month. Last month was the hottest June in Texas on record, breaking the previous peak in 1953.
The pain is spreading to businesses that serve the farms. West of Mr Hancock, the Meadow Farmers Co-op Gin – the machine that strips cotton fibres from the seeds – will hire only one 16-person crew at autumn harvest time, rather than the two round-the-clock crews that handled last year’s bumper crop.
“I am hoping for a third of what we ginned last year,” says Dan Jackson, general manager. “But with each day that we don’t get measurable moisture, that kind of dims.”
Texas grew 43 per cent of last year’s 18m-bale cotton crop in the US, the world’s top exporter of the fibre, with the main cotton lands in the high plains encircling Lubbock. The US Department of Agriculture last week cut its forecast for this year’s domestic cotton crop by 1m bales to 16m, as farmers abandoned a record 30 per cent of their fields.
In May, the drought had already caused $1.5bn in agricultural losses, a number that is sure to rise as the drought persists, according to the Texas Agrilife Extension Service. The USDA has declared most of Texas a primary disaster area, making farmers eligible for emergency benefits.
The state has more than 13m cattle, more than any other. But the size of the herd, dwindling for years, may shrink faster as ranchers are forced to sell calves and breeding cows they cannot feed.
“There’s no green,” says George Enloe, a cattle broker in Amarillo, Texas. “It looks like the dead of winter, except when you roll the window down it’s 100 degrees (38C).”
The drought began about a year ago. Rain stopped falling last autumn, and has remained scarce partly because La Niña, the Pacific weather phenomenon, steered moisture away during the winter. Now an inert dome of broiling air appears clamped over much of the south. With little evaporation from dry soils, thunderstorms do not form, says Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon.
Old-timers are comparing the situation to a legendary “big drought” of the 1950s. The parallel is not encouraging, as that one lasted years.
“What sets this one apart is that it is extremely intense, although at this time relatively shortlived,” says Mark Svoboda, climatologist at the national drought mitigation centre at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Although the situation in the US is helping to buoy cotton above its average cost of production, global prices have been falling. An intense rally last year spurred farmers elsewhere, notably Australia and India, to plant more cotton. Textile mills have also responded to costly cotton by weaving more polyester into fabrics.
The USDA estimates the just-harvested domestic hard winter wheat crop will this year total just 791m bushels, down from 1bn last year. Wheat prices, which took off last year after a grain export ban was declared in the Black Sea, have remained supported by the dismal US outlook.
The drought has led some in Texas to wish for a hurricane to attack the heat dome from the Gulf of Mexico. Arlene, the first named storm of the season, doused a sliver of southern Texas in late June.
“They can be a life saver,” said Rosalee Coleman, a Live Oak county cattle rancher and immediate past president of the Texas Independent Cattlemen’s Association.
“Of course, we don’t wish anyone harm. I always wish that it would go between Corpus Christi and Brownsville because that is ranchland. There’s not a lot of houses and a hurricane can blow across there and not do any damage – then it curves up and we get all the moisture.”
Tropical depression forms over Bahamas - Sacramento News - Local and Breaking Sacramento News | Sacramento Bee
MIAMI -- A tropical depression has formed in the Atlantic Ocean near the northern Bahamas and forecasters say it could strengthen into a tropical storm in the next day.
Authorities in the Bahamas issued a tropical storm watch for Grand Bahama and the Abaco Islands. The storm isn't expected to approach the U.S.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center says the storm's center was located Sunday afternoon about 60 miles (96 kilometers) northeast of Freeport on Grand Bahama. Its maximum sustained winds were near 35 miles per hour (56 kph) and it was drifting slowly south at 2 mph (3 km).
Forecasters expected the storm to turn to the north or northeast and say it could strengthen into a tropical storm by Sunday night.
ITC Ruling Threatens Future of Android | PCWorld
Apple won a preliminary victory over HTC--and over Android by proxy--when the ITC agreed this week that HTC smartphones violate two Apple patents. The ITC decision could be a sign that the Android party is over, and the mobile OS could be in trouble.
Why is the ITC ruling such a death blow? Because the patents in question are not unique to HTC--they are integral to the Android OS itself. If HTC is found to be violating these two Apple patents, then so are Motorola, and Samsung, and anyone else making Android devices.
Apple is waging war against Android by proxy with patent battles against HTC and Samsung.Florian Mueller, an expert on intellectual property, explains in a blog post, "Those patents are apparently infringed by code that is at the core of Android."
Mueller has created a table that walks through the two patents and compares the patented concepts against the HTC / Android implementation. Reviewing the information on the tables, Mueller exclaims, "It's hard to see how any Android device could not infringe them, or how companies could work around them."
One of the primary benefits of Android--and a driving force behind its broad adoption by smartphone vendors, and rapid success in the market--is that the OS is open source (well..almost), and license free. More and more, though, it seems like the lack of licensing paid to Google for using Android will be more than compensated for by fees and royalties being paid to Apple, Microsoft, and others that the Android OS infringes on.
As it stands, Microsoft is making more money from Android licensing agreements with companies like HTC than it is from its own Windows Phone 7 mobile OS. It is also pursuing legal action with Samsung and has proposed a deal of $15 per Android device.
Those costs start adding up quickly. Vendors like HTC and Samsung then have to choose whether to pass the costs along to consumers by charging more for the Android devices, or eat the expense and cut severely into their own profit margin.
Rebekah Brooks arrested in UK hacking scan - The Washington Post
LONDON— Rebekah Brooks, a top executive in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. media empire before resigning Friday in the wake of a phone hacking scandal, was arrested Sunday by Scotland Yard in a broadening probe into illicit newsgathering.
Police confirmed a 43-year-old woman was taken into custody Sunday on charges of conspiring to intercept communications and on corruption allegations, a reference to bribes made to police officers for news tips. Widespread British media reports identified the woman as Brooks, making her the highest-ranking News Corp official yet to be arrested in the case.