Weathering the weather

This week, cities and towns across the Mississippi River Basin got a big dose of winter weather, and our journalists covered it all. In Little Rock, Arkansas, the Democrat Gazette reports that sleds were hard to find. In Kansas City, Flatland had some great tips on weatherizing your home for energy efficiency, even for renters.

There's always an environmental angle to these events, too. Back in 2023, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did some interesting reporting on road salt washing into Wisconsin waterways, where it can impact wildlife, disrupt the aquatic ecosystem, and eventually make its way into groundwater and corrode plumbing. It's no small impact either: a study found a 66% increase of chloride (a component of salt) at a monitoring site on the Mississippi River.

More recently, the Journal Sentinel revisited the topic of salt impacts and reports more than a third of public wells tested in Wisconsin were above the recommended limit for people on low-salt diets, a concerning data point in a state that has more than a million adults with high blood pressure.

"That's a big deal," said Shannon Haydin, the Wisconsin DNR's stormwater section manager. "A lot of people in our state are taking in more salt than they are accounting for."

On the other end of the spectrum, KMOV in St. Louis reports on a year of record heat as Los Angeles is ravaged by wildfires, which are made worse by climate change. (Also worth a read, this dataset from Climate Central on global heat records.)

These are the kind of stories I like to see from Desk reporters, pulling the thread just a bit more to uncover unique environmental angles on everything from daily weather to new datasets.

Thanks for reading. More next week from across the Basin!

Sincerely,

Michael Crowe
Interim Assistant Director,
Ag & Water Desk