Sunday March 14th… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing post will be to track United States extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
More Iranian Flooding
This weekend a few articles concerning ongoing flooding caught my eye…this time on Iran. This spring has been tumultuous not only in our Midwest but for yet another country. This situation was first brought to my attention when Dr. Jeff Masters compiled this report on April third:
https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Record-Floods-Iran-Kill-62-Cause-Over-1-Billion-Damage
Here is Steve Brown’s tweet included in that report:
Now a couple of weeks later we are seeing more reports of flooding:
Iran Expands Flood Warnings to Five Northeast, Southern Areas
By Golnar Motevalli April 13, 2019 11:26 AM EDT
Floods in Ahvaz, the capital of Iran’s southwestern province of Khuzestan.
Photographer: Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images
Quoting the Bloomberg article:
Authorities in Iran expanded flood warnings to five additional provinces Saturday as rescue efforts continue across the western flank of the country already drenched by heavy rain.
Residents from the northeast to the south, including islands in the Persian Gulf, have been told to brace for flooding, thunderstorms and heavy showers in the next two days, the semi-official Fars news reported, quoting Ahed Vazife, director of meteorological forecasts and warnings at the Meteorological Organization of Iran.
Severe floods since March 19 have so far killed 70 people and forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of others from scores of villages across swathes of Iran’s northwestern and central region.
Khorasan Razavi, Khorasan Shomali and Khorasan Junoubi in Iran’s northeast and Sistan-Baluchistan, Bushehr and Hormuzgan in the south, including the island of Qeshm, will be affected by a weather front starting as soon as Saturday night and continuing into Sunday, Vazife is quoted as saying.
Khorasan Razavi, home to Iran’s second-largest city Mashhad, expects an “unprecedented” level of rainfall of above 50 millimeters (2 inches) in some areas, Vazife said.
Iranian officials have said that U.S. sanctions are blocking the Red Crescent from accessing aid money from overseas. So far the United Nations, Kuwait, Germany and the European Union have airlifted medicines, food and equipment — water pumps, tents, bedding and boats — to reach the provinces of Mazandaran, Golestan, Ilam, Lorestan and oil-rich Khuzestan.
So what does the flooding in Iran have to do with global warming? I did a quick check of 500 millibar height anomalies, which also depicts the latest rain maker, as indicated by the blue divot, moving across the country:
Most of the rest of Asia has higher than average heights except for Russia as of this Sunday. I suspect that divots or cold upper lows forming and moving south of warm ridges have been the predominant weather pattern for Iran this spring. Remember what I’ve written about a weakening, meandering jet stream? Such a pattern should be more common as the globe warms; thus, the climate change tie in.
Honestly, I can’t definitively blame Iran’s floods to carbon pollution, but it will be interesting to see future attribution studies. And…
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Here is some more climate and weather news from Sunday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article.)
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Guy Walton- “The Climate Guy”