Water and Sand

(NOTE: Another version of this blog is repeated on my Idaho water site.)

The classroom at the water building where I've attended classes about water is exactly where it has always been. My problem when I couldn't find anybody there two weeks ago was that I stopped one door short of the very last door! You can hardly see it, but it's there.

Today's speaker was Professor, V. Sridhar, Ph.D., P.E., from BSU. I didn't take my program with me and was amused to hear one of the class members in another venue (it is transmitted live to four other sites in Idaho) call him by name. I thought he was saying "Dear Sweetheart."

Anyway, most of his talk concerned the "Sand Hills of Nebraska," although he did talk a bit about nature's balancing act with energy and water.
He and his colleagues have calculated the direction the sand dunes of Nebraska would take if wind directions changed a bit. I thought it was interesting that winds blowing north to south, or vice versa, are warmer than winds blowing east to west or the reverse. Most of the Nebraska area of sand supports a few inches of grass and doesn't reveal the thousands of tons of sand below or the precarious situation of that little bit of topsoil.

He had praise for an organization known as the "Sandhills Taskforce," a group of volunteers in Nebraska. The goal, as posted on the organization's Web site, is "to enhance the sandhill wetland-grassland ecosystem in a way that sustains profitable private ranching, wildlife and vegetative diversity, and associated water supplies."