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July 17, 2012

Host: Ted Simons

Arizona Weather Update

  |   Video
  • An update on the drought that’s gripping the nation and a look at Arizona’s monsoon season with Randy Cerveny, a professor of geographical sciences who directs the meteorology program at Arizona State University.
  • Randy Cerveny - Professor of Geographical Sciences, ASU Meteorology Program
Category: Environment   |   Keywords: weather, update, enviornment, drought, ,

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Ted Simons: Arizona got a good soaking over the weekends but the state is still in a drought that's been around for the last 13 years and Arizona's not alone. More than half of the country is experiencing what is being called the worst drought since 1956, and the dry conditions keep on spreading. Joining us is Randy Cerveny, he is a professor of geographical sciences and director of ASU’s meteorology program. Good to see you again, thanks for joining us.
Randy Cerveny: Thank you.
Ted Simons: Before we get started here, what is the definition of a drought?
Randy Cerveny: [Laughs] That's actually one that’s fairly controversial. Depending on who you talk to there are different definitions. A farmer will say not having enough water to meet their crop needs. A hydrologist will say how much water do we have behind the reservoirs and use the drought to find off of that. It's dependent on upon who is talking as to what the definition is.

Ted Simons: Someone says 55% of the United States is suffering through drought conditions. What's to say they're right? What's going on out there? Why is this happening?

Randy Cerveny: Well, we can actually the way that we work with that in terms of a national determination is that state climatologists from around the country make some determinations about our particular areas and the state climatologist for Arizona is Nancy Sullenger has kind of defined that. But what has actually happened that is kind of interesting is that we're in a kind of a periodic drought cycle that a lot of people don't realize this but when you talk about the dust bowl days of the 1930s or the big drought that we had in the 1950's that there's a certain period that we see with droughts. People here at the University of Arizona tree ring laboratory have done quite extensive research across the country looking at tree ring records and they find a fairly pronounced 20-year cycle to droughts. We had it in the 30s, in the 50s, again in the '70s, again in the '90s. It's not unusual to expect we would have it this decade.

Ted Simons: Well that’s very interesting. But why would it come in these 20-year cycles? There's got to be a reason for that, isn't there?

Randy Cerveny: That's what climatologists try to figure out. Is there anything in nature that follows that same kind of cycle. And oddly enough the one thing that we can find that has a very pronounced roughly 20-year cycle is the sun spots on the sun, the type and the number of sunspots follows a 22-year cycle that corresponds very closely to the drought over the United States.

Ted Simons: Well, so corresponds but do we know why? Why would a sunspot affect weather to that degree here?
Randy Cerveny: Well, unfortunately we don't know. We can make some speculation, and the current idea is that it has to do with the amount of cosmic rays that come from the sun that changes on high sun spot years compared to low sun spot years. So the driving force on clouds and rainfall for the world seems to be how much cosmic rays we have. Therefore, if you have a variation in sunspots you vary the cosmic rays, you might vary the precipitation in some regions of the earth.

Ted Simons: So if someone is saying that Lannion or El Nino or lack of either one is playing a factor into what's happening now, would that be a secondary issue as opposed to sunspots or is Lannion a factor?

Randy Cerveny: It's a secondary factor, kind of like mother nature rolls the dice and now all the die are snake eyes. We're getting the jackpot of situations where you have just the right conditions in terms of maybe sunspots but you also then have situations in the sea surface temperatures in the Pacific, this El Nino, Lannion situation that is going on. Plus you have changes in the jetstream that can modify where the storms are actually traveling.

Ted Simons: So back to the definition of a drought, we're looking at maybe 20-year cycles, but for much of the '70s, we had some monster rainstorms that closed bridges and everyone was standing idly in their cars waiting. But with all this going on, can a drought just come up out of nowhere? How long does it have to be dry before you call it a drought.

Randy Cerveny: Uh, again that's dependent upon who you talk to. For Arizona we can come in and out of droughts fairly quickly. The amount of water that's needed to replenish the crop situation here isn't that much. We don't get that much, so it doesn't take a lot to change it. But you get into a place like Texas or Oklahoma or Kansas and it takes substantially more water to get them out of a drought situation. So that's what the big problem is. You all remember that a few years ago we had this tremendously dry situation in Texas. Frankly it hasn't gotten any better because they haven't had tropical storms coming through. So you had this going on for years and years and the soil starts to transform itself, becomes less producible.

Ted Simons: So after last week, last question here, after last week here in the valley with all that rain and all that clouds and beautiful temperatures, absolutely fantastic, do sunspots, does the drought elsewhere, is any of that a factor in the monsoon?

Randy Cerveny: No. It really isn't. The monsoon is driven very much by local circumstances. By how much heat we get and where the winds are coming from. Last week we had a very nice situation where the winds were all coming up from the Gulf of California and it just dumped on us. We had four days of rainfall. That's the first time in four years we have had four consecutive days of rainfall in Arizona.

Ted Simons: SO here's my last question then. If a drought can be a flash drought, come up quickly, can you end the drought rather quickly or is that more gradual process?

Randy Cerveny: For us, it can end fairly quickly. We can get several storms and for farmers at least a drought might be over. For people at SRP, talking about how much water is behind the reservoirs, it might take longer. For a place like Texas it takes a lot longer. They need a lot more rainfall because they need each year to have a lot more rainfall for their crops. We don't. So we can get out of a drought much faster than they can.

Ted Simons: Alright, good stuff Randy. Good to see you. Thanks for joining us.

Randy Cerveny: My pleasure.

Maricopa Community College District

  |   Video
  • As the Maricopa Community College District is celebrates its 50th anniversary, Dr. Rufus Glasper, the Chancellor of Maricopa Community Colleges, talks about the role of community colleges in Arizona.
  • Dr. Rufus Glasper - Chancellor, Maricopa Community Colleges
Category: Education   |   Keywords: maricopa, community, colleges, ,

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Ted Simons: 50 years ago the Maricopa community college district was created to address the growing need for affordable higher education. To talk about the history and the future of community colleges is Dr. Rufus Glasper, Chancellor of the Maricopa community college district. Good to see you here. Thanks for joining us.

Rufus Glasper: Good evening.

Ted Simons: 50 years ago, what were community colleges intended to do?

Rufus Glasper: Well 50 years ago, community colleges were established as Junior colleges. Primary focus at that time was transfer to the four-year institutions, complete the first two years then transfer to a university or to a college. And as we have transitioned over the years, in 1971, the Arizona state legislature changed the Junior college to a community college to broaden our mission realty. Mission realty is we do technical training and we do other types of training that support our community and our mission.

Ted Simons: Talk about the models. From your research, I don't think you were here quite at the 50-year Mark, but did Arizona look at other community colleges, Junior college programs around the country, or was this something pretty much invented here or started here and you learned as you go?

Rufus Glasper: No, there were other community colleges, Junior colleges established. In 1920, Phoenix College was established as a Junior college, as a transfers institute to the existing state universities.

Ted Simons:Why were there no other Junior colleges or few others?

Rufus Glasper: At the time, we did not have the population growth. Since the establishment of Phoenix college in 1920, in the early 1960s, 1962, we started expanding into additional colleges. Since then we have expanded from three colleges to now we have ten community colleges and two skill centers.

Ted Simons: is there difficulty working with the municipalities? Seems there are so community colleges now and a lot of cities have one, cooperation, collaboration there or is it sometimes a push and shove?

Rufus Glasper: I think there's always a little pushing and shoving, however I believe our cooperation is great. As a matter of fact, we are working with cities and towns as part of what I have termed empowerment zones. Our resources are diminishing in many cases and so are cities and towns, so we're looking at ways to establish sites such as in surprise. We're looking at one right now in queen creek. This is to bring in the cities and public libraries as we did in south Phoenix.

Ted Simons: Talk about collaboration with four-year institutions. Is there cooperation with for-profit universities? How is that whole dynamic working?

Rufus Glasper: The cooperation with four-year institutions both public and private is at an all time high. Within the last three years we have established articulation agreements unprecedented in history. Our students are now able to transfer to the university and I’ll use ASU as a primary focus. We can now transfer students into the university and into individual colleges. We currently have a Maricopa ASU pathways project that maps back individual programs to our colleges and students can transfer seamlessly if they follow those paths. We currently have 800 students in that program today.

Ted Simons: Also as far as the future and development you have to look at home learning, online learning. How is that working in the community college world?

Rufus Glasper: We have received a number of home learning students but we also have expanded our online. The price point of higher education in general is becoming unaffordable for many. So we're trying to figure out ways to keep the costs down and online education, hybrid education where you take part of your course work in the classroom and part online is becoming more and more the norm. It allows students who have evening jobs, night jobs and others to get their course work in but it's great for other students who have other obligations as well.

Ted Simons: with that in mind, we talked about what community colleges were intended to do some 50 years and before, has that mission changed over the years? Have the goals changed?

Rufus Glasper: Our primary mission has stayed relatively the same. Our mission is teaching and learning and public service, however, we have expanded in terms of our outreach from being just a transfer institution to now being a provider of both technical support and a broader curriculum. We are the largest provider of work force training in the state of Arizona. We provide education for more police, fire, teachers, and allied health programs than any other institution in the state of Arizona.

Ted Simons: talk about budget cuts.

Rufus Glasper: They have impacted us dramatically. We have gone from a high in 1986 or '87 of about 27% from the state where we're down to about 1%. But we're working. We understand the state has its budget to balance. We're trying to balance our. We have become more effective, more efficient. We have balanced our budgets. This year we balanced our budget and did not increase tuition or property taxes.

Ted Simons: Will we see in the future four-year community colleges?

Rufus Glasper: I believe they are the desirable four year community colleges in the state of Arizona. Probably within five years I 17 think that the momentum will build. We have great transfer relationships with our state universities and I would like to try to exhaust that as much as we can.

Ted Simons: All right, Chancellor thanks for joining us.

Rufus Glasper: thank you.

Phoenix Coyotes Arena Deal Referendum

  |   Video
  • Craig Tindall - Glendale City Attorney
Category: Politics   |   Keywords: Glendale, coyotes, sports, ,

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Ted Simons: Back to the number required signatures
Craig Tindall: Right.

Ted Simons: Was that something communicated to this group?




Ted Simons: Who decides it was misleading?







Craig Tindall: Absolutely. My pleasure.