newYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Parts of northern Texas, hit by an extreme and exceptional drought, have been flooded by torrential rains. During drought.
Sound familiar? it should. The Dallas area is the latest area to be hit by drought but flooding, likely plagued by human-induced climate change during a summer of extreme weather whiplash, scientists say. Says Part of the world is swinging from drought to great flood.
The St. Louis area and 88% of Kentucky were considered unusually dry in early July, but then the skies opened up and biblical amounts of rain poured in inches at a time, creating lethal rainfall. Floods devastated communities. The same thing happened to him at Yellowstone in June. Earlier this month, a severe drought hit Death Valley, with nearly a record amount of rainfall in a single day, causing flooding.
China’s Yangtze River is drying up after a year of deadly floods. China is already entering its third month under a record-long heat wave, with overnight lows dropping to 94.8 degrees Celsius (34.9 degrees Celsius) in the densely populated city of Chongqing, according to a preliminary report. there was a report. In western China, more than a dozen people died in floods caused by sudden heavy rains.
Widest drought in nine years expected to widen
In the Horn of Africa, where devastating famine and drought have gone unnoticed, flash floods are occurring nearby, further exacerbating the humanitarian disaster. After unprecedented flooding last year, Europe is facing record heatwaves as 500 years of drought have dried up rivers and threatened power supplies.
“So we’ve had a lot of whiplash,” Megan Szhargorodski, an interim climatologist in Kentucky, said. It is really difficult to understand how to recover from disaster after disaster that we see.”
In just two weeks from late July to early August, the United States experienced 10 heavy rains that would have a 1% chance of happening. This is sometimes called his one storm in 100 years, and is the calculation of Greg Carbin, head of the Prediction Branch of the Center for Weather Prediction. The Dallas area has more than 9 inches of precipitation in 24 hours, with storms likely to hit him once in 1,000 years, ending on Monday, and some places can expect a few more inches. I have.
“Of course, these extreme conditions are getting more and more extreme,” says climate scientist Gerald Mir of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who wrote some of the first studies on extreme weather and climate change 18 years ago. “This is in line with what we expected.”
Western nations rush as deadline to cut Colorado River water-use looms
Climate scientist Jennifer Francis of the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, says whiplash in weather that “suddenly changes to opposite extremes” is so strange that it’s becoming more pronounced. disease research.
World Weather Attribution scientists, mostly volunteers, rapidly examine extreme weather for fingerprints of climate change. We have strict criteria for the events we investigate. It must be record-breaking, cause a significant number of deaths, or affect at least 1 million people. Man. So far this year has been overwhelming. There were 41 events, eight floods, three storms, eight droughts and 18 heat, according to his WWA staff member Julie Arigi, associate director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center. A wave, four cold snaps reaching its threshold.
In the United States, much of the heavy summer rain has traditionally been caused by hurricanes and rainforests, as last year’s Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana before hitting the South before flooding New Jersey, New York at record rainfall rates. Related.
But in July and August of this year, the United States was hit by “extreme non-tropical rainfall excesses,” said Carbin of the National Weather Service. “It is abnormal.”
Heatwaves Explained: Why Some Heatwaves Are Worse Than Others
Scientists believe climate change works in two different ways.
The biggest method is simple physics. Scientists say that as the atmosphere warms, it will hold 4% more water for each degree Celsius (7% for every degree Celsius).
Think of the air as a giant sponge, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the Nature Conservancy. It absorbs more water from the dry ground like a sponge. Then as the weather system moves further and juicy with that extra water, it releases even more water, causing heavy rains.
Another factor is the jet stream, the atmospheric river that drives weather systems around the world, said Francis of Woodwell. The Storm system does not move and only releases large amounts of water in some locations. Other regions, like China, suffer from hot weather as cooler, wetter weather moves around them.
Another dangerous side effect of Europe’s heatwave: Surge in air pollution
“When that jet stream pattern is amplified, we find that this is happening more frequently and we’re seeing a lot more of these big whiplash events,” Francis said.
Drought makes the ground very hard, so water doesn’t seep through as much and runs off more quickly during floods, Francis and colleagues said.
Because climate change will only get worse as it gets worse, says Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist at Princeton University, “it highlights the kinds of events we have to adapt to, and how we strengthen ourselves.” I need to,” he said.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has highlighted worsening weather disasters as a future threat.
10 dead in Oregon in suspected Pacific Northwest heatwave, official says
Maarten van Aalst, co-author of the IPCC report and director of the Dutch Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Center, said: “Frankly, how quickly and how badly is it going now? It surprises many of us that the