“Asheville Was Called a Climate Haven. Then Hurricane Helene Came“. The Washington Post has the story here; an excerpt:
“…In some areas of western North Carolina, four to five months of rain fell in less than three days. More than 40 people have died in Buncombe County, where Asheville is the county seat, as homes, businesses, roads and livelihoods were swept away in the rising waters of Hurricane Helene. The floods illuminate two truths about a world transformed by global warming, experts say. It is unlikely that any places will be truly safe from climate change — and even high-elevation, inland areas are vulnerable to drowning in a world where planetary warming is fueling heavier rains...”
“North Carolina Was Set Up for Disaster“. Why was Hurricane Helene so destructive, so far inland away from the water? Here’s an excerpt of a post at The Atlantic:
“…Helene bore some of the hallmarks of a hurricane in a too-warm world, such as rapid intensification. The hurricane drew fuel from abnormally warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, which likely helped extend the storm’s life. A study examining hurricanes that made landfall between 1967 and 2018, for example, found that modern-day hurricanes extend farther inland because they contain more moisture collected during their journey over warmer seas. Hurricanes are now decaying at a slower rate after traveling inland. As some powerful hurricanes are known to do, Helene generated wet weather in North Carolina that arrived far ahead of the main system. This particular storm front delivered enough rain to prompt a rare advisory from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration about flood risk in urban areas including parts of the southern Appalachians…”
Credit: NOAA NSSL MRMS via The Eye Wall
New research suggests that the long-term death toll from tropical cyclones is much higher than previously thought:
“The Hidden Toll Taken by Tropical Storms“: The Verge has the entire post here.
“Tropical storms take many more lives than officially recorded, according to a sobering study published today in the journal Nature.It comes as people across the Southeastern US scramble to find loved ones in the wreckage of Hurricane Helene. The average tropical storm or hurricane leads to the early deaths of between 7,170 and 11,430 people, the researchers estimate. That’s astronomically higher than the average of 24 direct deaths per storm documented in government records spanning more than half a century. “We were quite stunned. So, if folks are surprised by these results, you know, we were right there, too,” says Rachel Young, a coauthor of the study who is an environmental economist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley…”
Has climate migration already begun? Some people living in Hurricane Alley appear to be having second thoughts. A story at DNYUZ.com caught my eye; here’s an excerpt:
“Living near the gleaming expanse of Tampa Bay in Florida used to require a certain calculus: Fear the Big One, a powerful hurricane that would tear into the densely populated region and drown people and property. But also rest assured that most Gulf of Mexico storms are near-misses — one has not directly hit Tampa since 1921 — and keep enjoying life on the coast. Lately, though, the calculus has changed. A rash of Gulf storms in recent years, culminating with Hurricane Helene on Thursday, has given way to a new reality for the booming region’s residents: Hurricanes that remain hundreds of miles away are likely to wreak havoc on the Tampa Bay region, as are smaller storms...”
Image credit: NOAA
Fact Check: Debunking Weather Modification Claims. It’s sad that NOAA has to point out that we don’t have the technology to create or “steer” tropical systems but here we are. Here’s an excerpt from NOAA: “…NOAA does not modify the weather, nor does it fund, participate in or oversee cloud seeding or any other weather modification activities. NOAA’s objective is to better understand and predict Earth’s systems, from the bottom of the seafloor to the surface of the sun. We are deepening our understanding and deploying new resources to improve forecasting and give communities earlier and more accurate warnings ahead of extreme weather events. NOAA is required by law* to track weather modification activities by others, including cloud seeding, but has no authority to regulate those activities…”
How Hurricanes are Supercharged by Climate Change. Newsroom has the story; here’s an excerpt: “…For tropical cyclones (including hurricanes or typhoons), the general expectation with global warming is for more activity. This can be manifested in several ways: more storms, more intense storms, bigger storms, longer-lasting storms, and all with a lot more rainfall. As the intensity increases, spiral arm bands become wrapped around the eye of the storm and can form a new eyewall farther from the centre. This is what meteorologists call eyewall replacement, where the new eyewall has a much larger radius. This process weakens the storm but makes it larger, and because of the warm oceans, they then recover strength and hence live longer...”
Climate Change: UN Report Says Planet to Warm 3.1C Without Greater Action. Reuters has the post; here’s the intro: “Current climate policies will result in global warming of more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, according to a United Nations report on Thursday, more than twice the rise agreed to nearly a decade ago. The annual Emissions Gap report, which takes stock of countries’ promises to tackle climate change compared with what is needed, finds the world faces as much as 3.1 C (5.6 F) of warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100 if governments do not take greater action on slashing planet-warming emissions...”
Credit: NOAA
Sources: U.S. Census, CoreLogic Note: Population changes shown on maps reflect domestic migration and do not include international migration or local births and deaths.
Where Americans Have Been Moving into Disaster-Prone Areas. A warmer climate sounds pretty good (during the winter months) but increasingly, it comes with a cost. Here’s an excerpt from The New York Times: “The country’s vast population shift has left more people exposed to the risk of natural hazards and dangerous heat at a time when climate change is amplifying many weather extremes. A New York Times analysis shows the dynamic in new detail:
• Florida, which regularly gets raked by Atlantic hurricanes, gained millions of new residents between 2000 and 2023.
• Phoenix has been one of the country’s fastest-growing large cities for years. It’s also one of the hottest, registering 100 straight days with temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit this year…”
Credit: Redfin
Nearly Two-Thirds of Home Buyers and Sellers Hesitant to Move to Area with Climate Risk. Redfin has the post; here’s an excerpt: “Nearly two-thirds (62%) of U.S. residents who plan to buy or sell a home in the next year are hesitant to move to an area at risk of natural disasters, extreme temperatures and/or rising sea levels. The share is even higher among younger generations, high-earners, Democrats and people living in the Northeast. That’s according to a survey commissioned by Redfin in August 2022 of roughly 1,000 respondents who said they intend to buy or sell a home in the following 12 months…”
More TV meteorologists are connecting the dots and speaking out, including a friend of mine who just retired in Philadelphia, Glenn “Hurricane” Schwartz. Here’s an excerpt of an interview he gave to Salon:
“You have direct experience encountering extreme weather. Why is it important for the public to contextualize this in terms of climate change?
These are the events that people remember the most. They’re the most important ones. They’re the most dangerous ones. And it also, it seems to be, and I think a lot of climate scientists agree on it, that the level of extremes has increased more than predicted by climate scientists. The averages are going right along with the predictions, astonishingly accurate over decades. But the extreme weather in the form of floods, hurricane intensification, sea level rise, glacier melting, a lot of those things are happening faster than the predictions certainly early in the IPCC process. It’s like each time they come out with a new report, the language gets stronger…”
“America’s Hurricane Luck is Running Out“. Was “Helene” a preview of what’s to come? Here’s an excerpt from The Atlantic:
“…For months now, the waters in the Gulf of Mexico have been abnormally hot, spiking several degrees over the past decade’s average temperatures. “It is simply not within or even close to the range of natural variability to have water temperatures this far above normal in the Gulf, over this wide of an area, to that deep of a depth,” Ryan Truchelut, a meteorologist in Florida who runs the consulting firm WeatherTiger, told me. “When the other ingredients you need to form a hurricane are present, the results are explosive.” In Helene’s case, those other ingredients included the state of hurricane-slowing winds (low) and hurricane-bolstering moisture in the air (plenty), Phil Klotzbach, a meteorologist at Colorado State University, told me. Its massive size was also due to happenstance—a low-pressure system that spun over the Caribbean and Central America a few days before Helene reached the Gulf Coast. Such vortexes are quite common around this time of year, Klotzbach said…”
Map credit: Note: Shaded counties are those that will, on average, have 0.5 days or more at or above a 125F° heat index in 2053; Data: First Street Foundation; Map: Axios Visuals.
An “Extreme Heat Belt” Will Soon Emerge in the US, Study Warns. Summers in the south are becoming increasingly oppressive, the result of hotter temperatures AND consistently higher dew points creating dangerous heat indices. Axios has the story; here’s the intro: “A new study reveals the emergence of an “extreme heat belt” from Texas to Illinois, where the heat index could reach 125°F at least one day a year by 2053.
The big picture: In just 30 years, climate change will cause the Lower 48 states to be a far hotter and more precarious place to be during the summer.
- The findings come from a hyperlocal analysis of current and future extreme heat events published Monday by the nonprofit First Street Foundation.
- The new report is unique for examining current and future heat risks down to the property level across the country, and joins similar risk analyses First Street has completed for flooding and wildfires…”
Credit: NOAA
“Just How Much Can We Trust AI to Predict Extreme Weather?” Smithsonian Magazine has the story of a new tool (AI) in the fight to improve the forecast accuracy of extreme weather events. AI may help with pattern recognition and determining which weather models will work best for a given scenario, but it doesn’t solve the challenge of data. We need more weather observations, more weather balloons and ocean buoys and surface observations to provide the high-resolution fuel that goes into the weather models meteorologists rely on.
“…Those methods using A.I. still incorporate physics, but the third big revolution in A.I. that has gained momentum in the last few years uses data-driven models that don’t incorporate physics at all. A.I. models trained on roughly 40 years of freely available weather data use the same collected weather data that is fed into supercomputers and create forecasts. But rather than having to make quadrillions of calculations to come up with a forecast, they simply look for patterns in data. For this reason, A.I. models can run on modest computers, even regular laptops, and spit out forecasts in seconds. And since the runs take hardly any time, A.I. can generate thousands of forecasts in the time it takes a numerical weather model to make one, allowing meteorologists to see a wider range of possible outcomes…”
Flood Emergencies from Extreme Rainfall Reach Record High. With 10-14% more water vapor in the air due to warming there is more fuel for extreme rainfall events. CNN.com reports: “Extreme weather has thrashed the United States this year with more flood emergencies than any other year — a deadly, sobering statistic that scientists say paints a picture of the future as the planet warms. An unprecedented 91 flash flood emergencies have been issued by the National Weather Service this year, more than any other year since this most-dire language was first used in 2003. All flash flood warnings are a sign of a very dangerous situation, but flash flood emergencies are the most rare – accounting for around 1% of flash flood warnings since 2019 – for a reason…
