Storm systems don’t move and just dump huge amounts of water in some places. Then when a weather system travels further, juicy with that extra water, it has more to dump, causing downpours.Īnother factor is the stuck and wavier jet stream - the atmospheric river that moves weather systems around the world - said Woodwell’s Francis. 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. Read More: The Ocean Is Climate Change’s First Victim and Last Resort 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. Read More: How Psychology Can Help Fight Climate Change-And Climate Anxiety
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