Extreme Weather

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  AFTER THE WATER

Drenching rains to pose greater threat to fire-damaged areas in West

by National Center for Atmospheric Research 4/01/2022 PHYS.org

The western United States this century is facing a greatly heightened risk of heavy rains inundating areas that were recently scarred by wildfires, new research warns. Such events can cause significant destruction, including debris flows, mudslides, and flash floods, because the denuded landscape cannot easily contain the drenching moisture.

A year after year disaster:' The American West could face a 'brutal' century under climate change

by Elizabeth Weise 4/02/2022 MSN

The first predicts the growth of wildfires could cause dangerous air quality levels to increase during fire season by more than 50% over the next 30 years in the Pacific Northwest and parts of northern California.

A second shows how expected increases in wildfires and intense rain events could result in more devastating flash floods and mudslides across a broad portion of the West.

“These studies reinforce the likelihood of a brutal future for the West,” said Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist and dean of the University of Michigan's School for Environment and Sustainability.

'We have nowhere': B.C. First Nations, rural residents say storm permanently changed the land

by Dan Fumano Nov 25, 2021 The Vancouver Sun

“It moved rivers and moved hills and filled valleys and then created new valleys … That’s the magnitude of that storm,” said the elected chief of the Shackan First Nation. “The land that our ancestors had worked for thousands of years and ensured that we had a place to grow … productive crops, those lands are no longer there. They’re just rocks.”

New and Strange Climate Pattern Includes More Violent El Nino Swings

by Georgia Institute of Technology NOVEMBER 22, 2019 SCiTech Daily

It is the first known time that enough physical evidence spanning millennia has come together to allow researchers to say definitively that: El Ninos, La Ninas, and the climate phenomenon that drives them have become more extreme in the times of human-induced climate change.

“What we’re seeing in the last 50 years is outside any natural variability. It leaps off the baseline. Actually, we even see this for the entire period of the industrial age,” said Kim Cobb, the study’s principal investigator and professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “There were three extremely strong El Nino-La Nina events in the 50-year period, but it wasn’t just these events. The entire pattern stuck out.”

Flash Floods Pose Existential Threat To Towns Across U.S.

<embed>https://apps.npr.org/ellicott-city/</embed>

When a flash flood ripped through Old Ellicott City in Maryland, residents thought it was a freak occurrence. Instead, it was a hint about the future. And adapting to that future has been painful. 

Polar Vortex:William Hall

Polar Vortex-William Hall 10/28/2019

The circulation processes driven by that energy transport generate the normally fairly predictable jet streams and polar vortexes. However, as 'forcing' temperatures change as the result of global warming, it is not unexpected that the highly non-linear dynamics generating the jet streams go through points of chaotic instability.

Simultaneous heatwaves caused by anthropogenic climate change

<embed>https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2019/04/simultaneous-heatwaves-caused-by-anthropogenic-climate-change.html</embed>

"Without the climate change that can be explained by human activity, we wouldn’t have such a large area being simultaneously affected by heat as we did in 2018,” says Vogel. She is alarmed by the prospect of extreme heat hitting an area as large as it did in 2018 every year if global temperatures rise by 2 degrees: “If in future more and more key agricultural regions and densely populated areas are affected by simultaneous heatwaves, this would have severe consequences.”

Killer Heat in the United States

[1]

Extreme heat is among the deadliest weather hazards society faces. During extremely hot days, heat-related deaths spike and hospital admissions for heat-related illnesses rise, especially among people experiencing poverty, elderly adults, and other vulnerable groups (NWS 2018; CDC 2017a). Temperatures around the world have been increasing for decades in response to rising heat-trapping emissions from human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels. These rising temperatures are causing more days of dangerous—even deadly—heat locally. This Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) analysis shows that if we stay on our current global emissions path, extreme heat days are poised to rise steeply in frequency and severity in just the next few decades. This heat would cause large areas of the United States to become dangerously hot and would threaten the health, lives, and livelihoods of millions of people. Such heat could also make droughts and wildfires more severe, harm ecosystems, cause crops to fail, and reduce the reliability of the infrastructure we depend on.

How Climate Change Could Be Linked to Stronger Hurricanes

[2]

“We can think of a hurricane as an engine,” said Dr. Mann. “It’s expanding energy. It’s doing work in the form of those winds at the surface that we’re familiar with. As we increase that temperature contrast by warming the surface, that engine becomes more efficient. It can do more work.”

Global Warming Is Messing with the Jet Stream. That Means More Extreme Weather

<embed>https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31102018/jet-stream-climate-change-study-extreme-weather-arctic-amplification-temperature</embed>

The study identifies how the faster warming of the Arctic twists the jet stream into an extreme pattern that leads to persistent heat and drought extremes in some regions, with flooding in other areas.

Projected changes in persistent extreme summer weather events: The role of quasi-resonant amplification

<embed>https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/10/eaat3272</embed>

A series of persistent, extreme, and costly summer weather events over the past decade and a half, including the 2003 European heat wave, 2010 Pakistan flood/Russian heat wave, 2011 Texas drought, 2013 European floods, 2015 California wildfires, and 2016 Alberta wildfires have led to ongoing discussion in the scientific literature regarding the relationship between anthropogenic climate change and warm-season weather extremes (1–27). Some increases in summer weather extremes can be explained by relatively straightforward thermodynamic processes, e.g., upward shifts in the temperature distribution leading to increases in the frequency of heat waves (1, 2, 5, 12, 13) or the influence of a warming atmosphere on intense precipitation events (10, 15, 16). A growing number of studies (3, 7, 8, 11, 14–16, 18–20, 22, 23, 26–28), however, suggest that mechanisms involving atmospheric dynamics are necessary to explain the characteristics—particularly the unusually persistent and amplified disturbances in the jet stream—that are associated with persistent extreme summer weather events.
Petoukhov et al. (11, 22) demonstrated that planetary waves within the synoptic wave number range (wave numbers 6 to 8) can become effectively trapped in a latitudinal waveguide depending on the meridional profile of the midlatitude westerly jet, thus providing a mechanism for the time dependence of resonant behavior, because that profile exhibits substantial variability in time. If these waveguide conditions hold, then a pronounced amplification of waves that are excited by orographic or thermal forcing can occur (32). This phenomenon is referred to as quasi-resonant amplification (QRA).

Is Climate Change Fueling Tornadoes?

<embed>https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30052019/tornado-climate-change-connection-science-research-data</embed>

There is growing evidence that "a warming atmosphere, with more moisture and turbulent energy, favors increasingly large outbreaks of tornadoes, like the outbreak we've witnessed in the last few days," said Penn State University climate researcher Michael Mann.

Floods, tornadoes, snow in May: Extreme weather driven by climate change across US

<embed>https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/05/29/severe-weather-across-us-driven-climate-change-trump-administration-new-jersey-kansas-dallas-fort/1271937001/</embed>

Flooding along the Mississippi River is the worst it’s been since 1927. More than 50 tornadoes touched down during the Memorial Day weekend. In Denver, it snowed more than three inches last week. 
Climate scientists say this is only the beginning of what will be decades of increasingly dangerous and damaging extreme weather – and there’s no question that much of it’s being driven by global warming.

Are hurricanes getting stronger – and is the climate crisis to blame?

<embed>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/20/are-hurricanes-getting-stronger-and-is-the-climate-crisis-to-blame/</embed>

The proportion of tropical storms that rapidly strengthen into powerful hurricanes has tripled over the past 30 years, according to recent research. A swift increase in pace over a 24-hour period makes hurricanes less predictable, despite improving hurricane forecasting systems, and more likely to cause widespread damage.

Losing Clouds

https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Losing-Marine-Stratocumulus-Clouds-Could-Create-Mega-Hothouse Climate Weather Underground 5/18/2019

If humanity maintains its current business-as-usual emissions path for the next 100 years, the resulting 4°C (7°F) of warming may be enough to cause highly reflective stratocumulus clouds over the subtropical and tropical oceans to disintegrate, resulting in an additional 8°C (14°F) of warming, according to research published in February. The resultant “Hothouse Earth” climate, 12°C (22°F) warmer than pre-industrial levels, would be enough to melt all ice on the planet, raise sea levels by over 200 feet over a period of centuries, and produce heat waves too hot for humans to endure outdoors for over half of Earth’s population (as currently distributed.)

Climate Change Bites in the Midwest

<embed>https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/12/as-climate-change-bites-in-americas-midwest-farmers-are-desperate-to-ring-the-alarm</embed>

Richard Oswald did not need the latest US government report on the creeping toll of climate change to tell him that farming in the midwest is facing a grim future, and very likely changing forever.

Extreme Canadian Flooding

<embed>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/30/canada-flooding-quebec-montreal-justin-trudeau-climate-change/</embed>

But Canada has done little to prepare for flooding that is likely to become even more common as the planet continues to warm, she said. “Responding to disaster is going to be a lot more expensive than being proactive in vulnerable sites.”

A World Without Clouds

<embed>https://www.quantamagazine.org/cloud-loss-could-add-8-degrees-to-global-warming-20190225/</embed>

A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth’s climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century.

Global Warming Is Messing with the Jet Stream. That Means More Extreme Weather

<embed>https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31102018/jet-stream-climate-change-study-extreme-weather-arctic-amplification-temperature</embed>

The findings suggest that summers like 2018, when the jet stream drove extreme weather on an unprecedented scale across the Northern Hemisphere, will be 50 percent more frequent by the end of the century if emissions of carbon dioxide and other climate pollutants from industry, agriculture and the burning of fossil fuels continue at a high rate.

Heat Wave Grips Japan after Deadly Floods

<embed>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/20/heatwave-grips-japan-after-deadly-floods</embed>

A heatwave in Japan has killed more than 30 people and complicated recovery efforts after recent flooding. In three prefectures that bore the brunt of the deadly floods and landslides – Hiroshima, Okayama and Ehime – 145 people were hospitalised with heatstroke symptoms on Thursday as temperatures soared above 35C. The tourist hotspot of Kyoto reached a record 39.8C on Thursday and recorded a high of 38.6C on Friday.