Saturday September 28th… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing blog 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).😉
New Climate Change Attribution Study On Imelda
Recently “weak” Tropical Storm Imelda with no more than 40 mph sustained winds made landfall in southeast Texas, but caused extreme Harvey like rain across the region. Some unfortunate souls got awful flooding damage in 2017 and again only two years later. Now many are throwing up there hands saying that enough is enough, planning on not rebuilding again. We are now in an Era where attribution to global warming (or climate change) study results can come quickly, so only a couple of weeks after Imelda we already have one for that system…this time from World Weather Attribution via Climate Central. Here are their findings:
Using a combination of observations and simulations, the group of scientists at the World Weather Attribution partnership (which included a scientist at Texas A&M at Galveston) concluded:
- The rainfall associated with Tropical Storm Imelda (September 19-20) was extreme, statistically expected approximately once every 1200 years at the station with the highest total amount of rainfall.
- The chance of recording this much precipitation at any of 85 stations along the Gulf Coast is much higher, about 1 in 50 years.
- Two standard statistical analyses of the observations show that the probability for such an amount of rain has increased by a factor 2.6 (1.6 to 5.0) since 1900. Equivalently, the amount of rainfall in such an event has increased by 18% (11% to 28%) since 1900.
- Taking high-resolution climate models into account, the scientists conclude that two-day extreme precipitation events along the Gulf Coast as intense as observed on September 19-20 (or stronger) have become 1.6 to 2.6 times more likely due to human-caused climate change, or 9% to 17% more intense.
For more information about the analysis and the authors of the study, visit their site:
As warm as Gulf waters are as of this writing we will be fortunate not to see another landfalling tropical system somewhere from Florida to Texas in 2019. I’ll state one more thing in association with today’s main topic. Adaption to A) higher precipitation amounts B) higher winds from storms, and C) higher sea levels will be crucial across all coastal areas of the United States. Let’s all support those making some good plans to limit damage, expense, and of course to prevent the threat to life and limb moving forward through the 21st century.
Here is more climate and weather news from Saturday:
(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.)
Here are some “ET’s from Saturday:
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Guy Walton- “The Climate Guy”