Extreme weather events hit US hard
Hurricane Ida just latest example to wreak havoc
Nicholas Bassill watched in horrified fascination Wednesday night as data from a network of rain gauges across metropolitan New York showed skyrocketing rainfall from the remnants of Hurricane Ida as it blew through the Northeast.
The lower Hudson Valley, much of Long Island, parts of New Jersey and Connecticut and the entirety of New York City saw extreme rainfall totals during the storm.
It was unlike anything Bassill, the director of research and development for a Center of Excellence at the University of Albany, had seen in the decade since those gauges were installed.
“You might expect one place to get some wild, absurd rainfall total or rainfall rates,” said Bassill, but not the entire metro area at once.
Ida, which struck Louisiana with 150 mph winds and more than a foot of rain, deluged every state in its path as it swept northeastward, killing more than 60 people. But the storm is just the latest in a series of extreme weather events across the country lately.
Record snow storms and freezing temperatures paralyzed Texas in February. Wildfires have ravaged nearly 5 million acres in the West this year. Extreme heat and drought scorched the Southwest and Northwest throughout the summer. Deadly flooding inundated cities in Michigan and Tennessee in June.
Last year the U.S. logged 22 billiondollar disasters, the most in history, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. This year, there have been eight through June.
Sixty-nine all-time precipitation records have been set across the country this year, and 422 records for all-time maximum temperature.
No single event, like Ida, proves that climate change is causing more rainfall. That would take months or years of study, Bassill said. “But if you were trying to prove it, these are the events you would use.”
Snowstorms, heat waves, wildfires and hurricanes have happened in the past, but warming temperatures is making natural disasters worse, more than a dozen climate scientists told USA TODAY in recent weeks.
The heat supersizes the effects of these storms, they said.
More intense rainfall in thunderstorms, tropical cyclones and other events is one of the most solid predictions as the atmosphere heats up, said Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
That’s because the air holds 7% more moisture for every 1.8 degree increase in
temperature. If the air warms by 2.5 degrees, that’s a 12% increase in water vapor.
That may not sound like a lot, but many of the nation’s flood control measures “were designed for the climate of the past,” he said. “You don’t have to exceed that by very much before these structures begin to fail.”
To see it all happening, “is a bit humbling to tell you the truth,” Emanuel said Thursday. “In some cases, these increases are larger than we expected to see and it makes us wonder if we’ve done our homework.”
Hurricane Ida
Stella Lavine swept muddy water from a sidewalk in front of her Philadelphia apartment on Thursday and looked around at the flood damage caused by remnants of Ida’s intense rainfall.
A historic canal in front of her home topped its banks after 9 inches of rain Wednesday night, sending water toward her apartment and into the next building over, prompting evacuations.
Ida formed in the Caribbean five days before making landfall on the Gulf Coast. As it moved over the warmer than normal Gulf of Mexico, the storm was able to intensify, taking advantage of a pocket of high heat, Peter Jacobs, a climate scientist and communications specialist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Institute.
“Ocean heat in general has been dialed up because we’ve warmed the climate, and the air is holding more moisture because we’ve warmed the climate and sea levels are higher because we’ve warmed the climate,” Jacobs said. “And all those things are sort of amplifying natural features of the storm.”
After dropping more than 16 inches of rain in some locations to the west of New Orleans, Ida soaked parts of Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee.
In the Northeast, the National Weather Service in Mount Holly, New
Jersey, reported more than 275 gauges in its region received more than 5 inches of rain, including 11 inches in Flemington, New Jersey.
In Newark, New Jersey, 6.4 inches exceeded what’s considered a 1 in 1,000 year rain event. A final total of 8.41 inches broke the city’s previous all-time rainfall record, set at 6.73 inches on Nov. 8, 1977. The 6.8 inches at LaGuardia International Airport in Queens, New York, broke another all time record.
In Philadelphia, where Lavine lives, one gauge in the city logged 9.36 inches of rain.
Lavine said she learned in previous floods that the trick is to sweep the wet mud away before it cakes and dries. As the waters rose on her street during the storm Wednesday, she said, she watched as they stopped a foot short of her door, then began to recede.
She’s among many who believe the extreme weather events are more than just a coincidence.
“There is something going on,” she said.
Elsewhere across the U.S.
Similar rainfall extremes have been seen in other weather events this year alone.
A new all-time 24-hour rainfall record was set in Tennessee in August when a storm dropped 17.06 inches of rain in Mcewen. More than 9 inches of that fell in just three hours – coming down at a rate of more than 4.25 inches an hour at one point.
The flooding prompted dramatic rescues but left 22 dead.
Detroit has seen flooding at least three times this summer. In June, more than 6 inches of rain fell on a Friday night, overwhelming the city’s stormwater system. It was the third historic flood event in just eight years, said Rich Pollman, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Detroit.
Among other extreme events this year was a system that plunged Texas into record cold temperatures for more than a week, and brought several rounds of snowfall, including 7.5 inches in Austin. The event triggered a statewide collapse of the power grid and caused the deaths of 210 people.
In March, a tornado outbreak sent 43 tornadoes ripping across 11 southern states. Scientists report tornadoes are forming earlier and later in the year and are occurring more often in some states.
In May, the formation of Tropical Storm Ana marked the seventh year in a row a named storm formed before the traditional June 1 start of the Atlantic hurricane season.
After Claudette, the season’s third named storm, blew through Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in June and dropped a sudden downpour of up to eight inches of rain in Northport, Kimberly Madison stood with tears in her eyes as a crew helped clean out her flooded home.
“We used to get intense rainfall once in a while, but now it happens really often,” Madison said. And it happens really often in Alabama.”
The opposite problem has plagued the American West this summer. Alltime maximum high temperature records fell in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana in June. In Phoenix, high temperatures were over 115 degrees for a record-setting six consecutive days, with a high of 118 degrees on June 17.
The extreme high temperatures combined to make June the warmest on record in the contiguous United States.
In California, where wildfires have burned more than 579,614 acres this summer and damaged or destroyed 400 structures, the fires have done something no fire has ever done in history. The Los Angeles Times reported this week that Chief Thom Porter of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said fires had burned across the Sierra Nevada for the first time.
Global trend apparent
The U.S. isn’t alone in these climate extremes. Hong Kong saw its warmest May on record. New Zealand saw its warmest June since records began in 1909.
Globally, July was the hottest July since records began 142 years ago, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In Europe, catastrophic flash flooding in July killed more than 230 in Germany and Belgium. German broadcasting company Deutsche Welle reported that Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, a research leader at Humboldt University in Berlin, said the question wasn’t whether climate change had contributed, but “how much.”
An international group called World Weather Attribution studies individual severe weather events around the globe to determine whether they can be attributed to the changing climate.