Quotes from the news wire:
As disruptive and as damaging as this year’s flooding has been, it’s still nowhere near close to what we foresee is the plausible worst-case scenario, we know that climate change is essentially putting the weather on steroids and giving us greater and greater chances of seeing these extremely heavy precipitation events and severe floods, even as we also see more severe droughts and that in the same part of the world.
Found on CNN 1 year ago
The ground is literally sunk in some places by 10 or 15 feet over the past decade, that has literally changed the topography of the historical lakebed. Some places are lower even than they were the last time there was a big flood event.
Found on CNN 1 year ago
Right now, the atmosphere and the ocean are both in sync and screaming ‘El Niño rapid development’ over the next few months.
Found on CNN 1 year ago
This is not nearly enough, partly because it’s a supply and demand problem. We still got a lot of straws in the ground, but you’d need multiple years like this in a row to really move the needle on recharging those aquifers.
Found on CNN 1 year ago
This [storm] is going to bring a whole litany of concerns that are probably greater than we had initially anticipated a few days ago, frankly, even widespread moderate rain at this point is going to exacerbate flood conditions in some places — so not the best news.
Found on CNN 1 year ago
This is an unusually high number of storms this winter in California, no matter how you slice it, no matter how you make these formal definitions, this is unusually many.
Found on CNN 1 year ago
If we have another summer punctuated by record heat – as we have pretty much every year for the past decade, at least somewhere in the West – then all of that extra vegetation still manages to dry out more or less completely, so, by the end of the summer and the fall, the peak of the dry season, what you then have is a system full of extra vegetation that is just as dry as it would have been.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
What’s concerning is that now, in a warming climate, even in some of the wet years, we’re seeing significant or even elevated severe fire activity because of how dry and warm it gets in the intervening months.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
This is not nearly enough, partly because it’s a supply and demand problem. We still got a lot of straws in the ground, but you’d need multiple years like this in a row to really move the needle on recharging those aquifers. There’s probably some recharge going on right now, but it’s unlikely to be the very large amount that would be needed to really make a big difference there.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
That could be a problem because we do have such an enormous snowpack right now, although right now, for the next two weeks, there is absolutely no indication of that at least, so that’s good.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
Multi-year droughts are going to look different than they used to.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
We haven’t seen the mega floods, but we have definitely seen hints of increasingly extreme precipitation even in the middle of what has otherwise been a period characterized by a pretty severe and persistent drought.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
This is really going to help a lot with the short-term drought in Northern California, perhaps even erase short-term drought conditions, but it’s going to take a lot more to completely obviate the longer term, multi-year drought impacts.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
The face of droughts is changing, it’s easier and easier to get into a drought – even following a really wet winter – because we just have that growing evaporative demand and hotter summers.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
In a warming climate, the severity of droughts in places like the Southwest and California are being driven by increasing evaporative demand, essentially, the atmosphere is requiring more water as temperatures rise, so you’d actually need more precipitation than you used to have to balance that out — and we’re not necessarily seeing more precipitation than we used to.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
This is one of those weather patterns where it's kind of boom or bust, we get a decent amount of rain, or we probably get nothing at all, so fingers are crossed, but it's been kind of a weird year.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
When people talk about this, they're often talking about the acreage burned and actually not only does it not tell the whole story, but it arguably doesn't tell most of what's important about why we care about wildfires in a societal context, just because the acreage burned has been less than in recent years, the impacts of these fires have actually still been really high.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
I think the extent of( megaflood) losses can be significantly reduced by doing certain sorts of things to revamp our flood management and our water management systems and our disaster preparedness.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
When this( flood) occurs again, the consequences would be wildly different than they were back in the 1860s.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
Ultimately, one of our goals is not just to understand these events scientifically, but it's also to help California prepare for them, it's a question of when rather than if( the megaflood) occurs.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
Even if there is still a relative lull in the winter, it's not as deep a lull as used to be.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
The commonality that we're seeing across most fire-prone regions on Earth is an increase in the number of extreme fire weather days, and also an increase in the magnitude of the very worst severe fire weather days, and that is linked to human-caused climate change.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
And that's the main climate change connection -- the effect that the warming and drying is having on the vegetation aridity itself, in most cases, the drier vegetation becomes, the more flammable it becomes. In some cases, it's an exponential relationship where each additional increment of drying makes it increasingly more flammable at an increasing rate.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
How do you know how much precipitation that might actually end up falling from that cloud occurred due to the seeding ? Or how much would have fallen without the seeding ? this isn't a setting where you can do a truly controlled experiment.
Found on CNN 2 years ago
The Colorado River shortage's extremely fortunate that October and December 2021 were very wet months in California, as otherwise this extremely dry January and start to February would have produced pretty dire consequences.
Found on CNN 3 years ago
The interesting piece here is that the effect of daily summer temperatures on fire appears to be non-linear, meaning that each additional degree of warming has a greater influence than the last, this is in line with other work suggesting that wildfire size and severity is increasing in a non-linear fashion in response to the increasing' vapor pressure deficit' — a measure of atmospheric' thirstiness' that is directly related to both humidity and temperature.
Found on CNN 3 years ago
Even if the jet stream does what it historically used to do, with no specific climate change contributions, climate change is still dramatically increasing the likelihood of these extreme heat events, if you warm the atmosphere, you'd expect those heat waves to be hotter than they otherwise would have been.
Found on CNN 3 years ago
A combination of factors -- including short-term severe to extreme drought and long-term climate change -- are in alignment for yet another year of exceptionally high risk across much of California's potentially flammable landscapes.
Found on CNN 3 years ago
This is one of the reasons why I think the highest increase in risk for wildfires will probably be in the forests. The risk of big true forest fires is going to be especially elevated in Southern California.
Found on CNN 3 years ago
Everything from the Rocky Mountain continental divide westward, including Colorado, Utah, Sierra Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico have fire conditions that look really, potentially explosive. The drought is even worse in those places than in Southern California, it looks pretty likely that it will be a severe fire season across most of West Linn.
Found on CNN 3 years ago
That couple of degrees of [ average ] warming over decades... you don't notice it as much, but it's still there lurking in the background, sucking extra moisture out of the vegetation and the soil.
Found on CNN 4 years ago
It's not so much that climate change is destabilising historical weather patterns, in many cases, it's amplifying them.
Found on Reuters 4 years ago
Unfortunately, [ Arizona is ] probably a preview of what's coming to the surrounding states over the coming weeks and months, because of this emerging drought across much of the West and the projections for a warmer than average summer just about everywhere, which is happening pretty often these days with climate change.
Found on CNN 4 years ago
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