NEWNow you can listen to the articles from Fox News!
Parts of northern Texas, mired in a drought labeled extreme and exceptional, are inundated with torrential rains. In a drought.
Sound familiar? Should. The Dallas region is just the latest location hit by drought but flooded during a summer of extreme weather whiplash, likely caused by man-made climate change, scientists say. Parts of the world are reeling from drought to flood.
The St. Louis area and 88% of Kentucky in early July were considered abnormally dry and then the skies opened, rain fell in biblical proportions, inch by inch, and deadly floods devastated communities. . The same thing happened in Yellowstone in June. Earlier this month, Death Valley, in a severe drought, experienced a near-record amount of rainfall in one day, causing flooding, and is still in a bad drought.
China’s Yangtze River is drying up one year after the deadly floods. China is baking under what is a record heatwave, already in its third month, with a preliminary report of a low night temperature dropping to only 94.8 degrees (34.9 degrees Celsius) in the densely populated city of Chongqing. And in western China, floods from a sudden downpour killed more than a dozen people.
THE MOST POPULAR SECURITY IN 9 YEARS INCLUDES AN EXTENSION
In the Horn of Africa, in the midst of a devastating but often overlooked famine and drought, the nearby flash floods add to the ongoing humanitarian disaster. Europe, which experienced unprecedented flooding last year, has been baked in record heat, exacerbated by a 500-year drought that is draining rivers and threatening electricity supplies.
“So we really had a lot of whiplash,” said Kentucky interim climate scientist Megan Schargorodski. “It is really difficult to emotionally overcome all these extremes, overcome them and understand how to be resilient through the disaster after the disaster that we see.”
In just two weeks between late July and early August, the United States had 10 showers that should only occur 1% of the time – sometimes called 1 in 100 year storms – the branch boss calculated. Weather Prediction Center Greg Carbin forecasts. That’s not counting the Dallas region, a likely 1 in 1,000-year storm, where some places had more than 9 inches of rain in 24 hours ending Monday with several inches more expected.
“These extremes are obviously getting more and more extreme,” said National Center for Atmospheric Research climatologist Gerald Meehl, who wrote some of the first studies 18 years ago on extreme climate and climate change. “This is in line with what we expected.”
After a summer filled with droughts and heatwaves that scorched the globe, the weather “whipped” and flipped to the other extreme, flooding, like the one pictured here pulling a house in Rock Creek in Red Lodge, Mont ., on June 15, 2022.
(AP Photo / David Goldman, File)
WESTERN STATES ARE INTENDED AS A TERM FOR CUTTING FRAMES FOR USE OF COLORADO RIVER WATER
The weather whiplash, “where it suddenly changes at the opposite extreme, is becoming more evident because it’s so strange,” said climate scientist Jennifer Francis of the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts. study of whiplash events.
World Weather Attribution scientists, mostly volunteers who quickly examine extreme weather conditions for a climate change fingerprint, have strict criteria on events to investigate – they must be record breaking, cause a significant number of deaths, or have an impact. on at least 1 million people. So far this year they have been inundated. There were 41 events – eight floods, three storms, eight droughts, 18 heatwaves and four coldwaves – that reached that threshold point, said Julie Arrighi, WWA official, associate director of the Center for Climate Red Cross and Red Crescent.
In the United States, many of the heavy summer rains have traditionally been linked to hurricanes or tropical systems, such as last year’s Hurricane Ida that hit Louisiana and then swept south to flood the New York region of New York. Jersey, with record rainfall rates.
But in July and August, the nation was hit by “an overabundance of extreme rainfall not related to the tropics,” Carbin of the National Weather Service said. “It’s unusual.”
EXPLANATION OF HEAT WAVES: WHY SOME HEAT WAVES ARE WORSE THAN OTHERS
Scientists suspect that climate change is at work in two different ways.
The greatest way is simple physics. As the atmosphere warms, it holds more water, 4% more for each degree (7% more for each degree Celsius), the scientists said.
Think of air as a giant sponge, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the Nature Conservancy. It absorbs more water from arid soil like a sponge “which is why in some places we are seeing worse droughts,” he said. So when a weather system travels farther, juicy with that extra water, it has more to drain, causing downpours.
Another factor is the blocked, more undulating jet stream, the atmospheric river that displaces weather systems around the world, said Francis of Woodwell. Storm systems do not move and only discharge huge amounts of water in some places. Other places, such as China, are blocked by hot weather as cooler, wetter weather moves around them.
ANOTHER DANGEROUS SIDE EFFECT OF THE HEAT WAVE IN EUROPE: INCREASED AIR POLLUTION
“When that jet stream pattern gets amplified, which is what we’re starting to see happening more often, we notice more of these big whiplash events,” Francis said.
When the soil is so hard from drought, the water doesn’t penetrate as much and flows faster in the event of a flood, Francis and others said.
The situation will only get worse as climate change worsens, so it “highlights the kind of events we need to adapt to, which we need to step up against,” said Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist at Princeton University.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlighted what it called an aggravation of weather disasters as a future threat.
NORTHWEST PACIFIC HEAT WAVE SUSPECTED IN 10 DEATHS IN OREGON, OFFICIALS SAY
“Frankly, how fast and how bad it is going now is a surprise to many of us,” said IPCC report co-author Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Center in the Netherlands. “It’s scary how quickly it appears before our eyes.”
