Praedictix: new tools at the intersection of climate change and extreme weather
Connecting the Dots: July 2024
Paul Douglas, Founder and Senior Meteorologist
Weather and climate are flip-sides of the same coin. A warmer climate is flavoring (all) weather now, making the weather extremes we all grew up with even more extreme, and more frequent. Here are some of the weather headlines that have caught my eye in recent weeks as we continue connecting the dots between a warmer, wetter atmosphere and a steady uptick in weather disruptions.
2024 has been another very active year of weather extremes, watches and warnings. Here’s a nugget that caught my eye:
“…So far in 2024, the NWS has issued some 13,000 severe-thunderstorm warnings, 2,000 tornado warnings, and 1,800 flash-flood warnings, plus almost 3,000 river-flood warnings, according to JoAnn Becker, a meteorologist and the president of the union that represents NWS employees.”
Hurricanes
Hurricane Beryl may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for many residents of Houston, a city that has experienced 30 damaging floods in the last 70s years. Between 2015 and 2017 Houston was impacted by 3 separate “500-year floods”. America’s 3rd largest city has the distinction of being the riskiest city in America to own a home.
“…In 2023, for the first time, pollsters from the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs asked about whether city residents had considered leaving. More than half of those surveyed said yes, with about a quarter saying it was because of the weather. “By far, Gen Z and millennials were the most concerned about weather,” said Renée Cross, the researcher and senior executive director of the Hobby School…”
Excerpt from ‘This Storm Has Broken People’: After Beryl, Some Consider Leaving”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/16/us/houston-exodus-climate-hurricane-beryl.html
NOAA NHC is making steady improvements in hurricane forecasting, especially with the track of a tropical system. Forecasting hurricane intensity at landfall is more problematic, with climate-fueled warm water often leading to explosive “rapid intensification” before a storm comes ashore. The forecasts will never be perfect, but they are getting better:
“…Meteorologists can now predict hurricane tracks with high accuracy, thanks to improvements in remote sensing technology, data collection and computer modeling. And they’re getting better at projecting intensity as well. “It’s remarkable how far we’ve come since the year 2000,” said NOAA’s National Weather Service Director Ken Graham at a hurricane season outlook briefing in May. “We’ve cut the track error by 64 percent, and we’ve cut intensity error in half….”
“The Wild History of Hurricane Forecasting” Scientific American
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-wild-history-of-hurricane-forecasting/
Derechos?
The derecho that hit northern Illinois and the Chicago area created an extensive track of damage from straight-line winds and (mostly small) tornadoes. At last report Illinois has experienced 126 tornadoes so far in 2024, the most on record. More details from the Chicago National Weather Service:
“…On the evening of July 15 a derecho brought very strong winds, several tornadoes, and heavy rainfall to a good portion of the Midwest. Thunderstorms initiated over central Iowa during the late afternoon hours then quickly spread east-southeast through southern Wisconsin, the northern half of Illinois, southern Michigan, and the northern/central Indiana.
Significant tree damage, some structural damage, and a few tornadoes resulted from the event with observed wind speeds of 111 mph in Dunlap, IL (Peoria County) & 105 mph near Speer, Illinois (Stark/Marshall County line).
Back-building of storms during the overnight hours brought very heavy rainfall and flash flooding near and south of a Galesburg to Sullivan line. The heaviest rain fell over Fulton and Mason counties where 4-7″+ were reported. The last time a derecho impacted central parts of Illinois was back on June 29, 2023.”
Source: National Weather Service: https://www.weather.gov/ilx/july15_derecho
Summer Heat & Humidity
Summers are heating up over time, especially over the western US. Map below courtesy of Brian Brettschneider.
There’s truth to the old cliche, “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity”. I’ll bet you’ve heard that a few times. A rapidly-warming atmosphere can hold more water vapor, and the result is a consistently higher summer heat index east of the Rocky Mountains with higher dew points fueling a more oppressive “feels like” temperature:
Map and data courtesy of Climate Central
Wildfire Concerns
By late July hundreds of fires were burning over the western US and Canada, many of them out of control – most sparked by lightning, even over far northern Canada, where temperatures are warming the fastest. The result was thick smoke hundreds, even thousands of miles downwind.
Fire is a natural part of Earth’s ecosystem and has been since the dawn of time. But (as climate scientists predicted 30-50 years ago) the wets are trending wetter and the dries are trending drier. Much of the western US is experiencing more hot, dry windy days where conditions are ripe for rapid spread of wildfires, now burning hotter and longer than they were a generation ago.
Map above courtesy of Climate Central. More details on wildfire trends here.
Hollywood Weather
I have yet to see “Twisters”, the movie, but I’m looking forward to checking it out, especially in an IMAX theater. I’ve seen 4 tornadoes, 1 in Minnesota and 3 in Oklahoma during tornado chases (usually tagging behind NSSL, which has an uncanny knack of finding these rare, fleeing meteorological flukes).
The notion of disrupting a tornado is the stuff of science fiction, at least for now. Even if you could disrupt a funnel’s circulation the parent supercell thunderstorm, a rotating thunderhead 5-10 miles in diameter, would remain in motion and a new funnel would spin up almost immediately. How are you going to stop a supercell from spinning? Good luck with that.
“One aspect of the new movie (“Twisters”) that lacks real-world basis is the idea of destroying individual tornadoes by having them suck up desiccant powder. While meteorologists have long attempted to modify how individual clouds can produce rain through a process known as cloud seeding, it’s highly unlikely that the small-scale methods depicted in the movie would have any real impact on tornadoes. To my knowledge, no one is actively pursuing such an approach…”
https://today.tamu.edu/2024/07/24/twisters-and-atmospheric-sciences-fact-vs-fiction/
Image credit: Universal Pictures
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