![]() It soaks up more water from parched ground like a sponge “which is why we’re seeing worse droughts in some places,” he said. Think of the air as a giant sponge, said UCLA and Nature Conservancy climate scientist Daniel Swain. As the atmosphere warms it holds more water, 4% more for every degree (7% more for every degree Celsius), scientists said. Scientists suspect climate change is at work in two different ways. In the United States, many of the big heavy summer rains are traditionally connected to hurricanes or tropical systems, like last year’s Hurricane Ida that smacked Louisiana and then plowed through the South until it flooded the New York, New Jersey region with record rainfall rates.īut this July and August, the nation had been hit with “an overabundance of non-tropical related extreme rainfall,” the National Weather Service’s Carbin said. There have been 41 events - eight floods, three storms, eight droughts, 18 heat waves and four cold waves - that have reached that threshold point, said WWA official Julie Arrighi, associate director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center. The scientists at World Weather Attribution, mostly volunteers who quickly examine extreme weather for a climate change fingerprint, have a strict criteria of events to investigate: they have to be record-breaking, cause a significant number of deaths, or impact at least 1 million people. She is in the middle of a study of whiplash events. Weather whiplash, “where all of a sudden it changes to the opposite’’ extreme, is becoming more noticeable because it’s so strange, said climate scientist Jennifer Francis of the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts. “These extremes of course are getting more extreme,” said National Center for Atmospheric Research climate scientist Gerald Meehl, who wrote some of the first studies 18 years ago about extreme weather and climate change. That’s not counting the Dallas region, a likely 1-in-1,000-year storm, where some places got more than 9 inches of rain in 24 hours ending Monday with several inches more forecast to come. had 10 downpours that are only supposed to happen 1% of the time - sometimes called 1-in-100-year storms - calculated Weather Prediction Center forecast branch chief Greg Carbin. In just two weeks in late July and early August, the U.S. “It is really difficult to emotionally go through all of these extremes and get through it and figure out how to be resilient through the disaster after disaster that we see.” “So we really have had a lot of whiplash,” said Kentucky’s interim climatologist Megan Schargorodski. Europe, which suffered through unprecedented flooding last year, has baked with record heat compounded by a 500-year drought that is drying up rivers and threatening power supplies. In the Horn of Africa in the midst of a devastating but oft-ignored famine and drought, nearby flash floods add to the humanitarian disaster unfolding. And in western China flooding from a sudden downpour has killed more than a dozen people. China is baking under what is a record-long heat wave, already into its third month, with a preliminary report of an overnight low temperature only dipping down to 94.8 degrees (34.9 degrees Celsius) in the heavily populated city of Chongqing. Earlier this month, Death Valley, in a severe drought, got a near record amount of rainfall in one day, causing floods, and is still in a nasty drought.Ĭhina’s Yangtze River is drying up, a year after deadly flooding. The same thing happened in Yellowstone in June. Louis area and 88% of Kentucky early in July were considered abnormally dry and then the skies opened up, the rain poured in biblical proportions, inch after inch, and deadly flooding devastated communities. Parts of the world are lurching from drought to deluge. ![]() ![]() The Dallas region is just the latest drought-suffering-but-flooded locale during a summer of extreme weather whiplash, likely goosed by human-caused climate change, scientists say. Parts of northern Texas, mired in a drought labeled as extreme and exceptional, are flooding under torrential rain. Business & Finance Click to expand menu.
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