Extreme Temperature Diary- Tuesday October 3rd, 2023/Main Topic: New Attribution Study For New York Storm

The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary 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 record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉

Main Topic: New Attribution Study For New York Storm

Dear Diary. In a world with what appears to be an increasingly short memory, I’m glad that climate scientists have recently come up with quick attribution methods for significant weather events. Attribution studies with short turn arounds do get more attention by the media and the public in general that has events fresh on their minds. One event, which most climate scientists like Doctor Katherine Hayhoe, that appeared to be a slam dunk candidate for being influenced by climate change was the recent New York City flood that I delved into here:

Extreme Temperature Diary- Friday September 29th, 2023/Main Topic: New York City Drowns – Guy On Climate

The big question here is how much did climate change exacerbate flooding? A quick attribution study was made over the weekend with some interesting findings that are found in the following Guardian article:

Type of storm that drenched New York is up to 20% wetter due to climate crisis | Climate crisis | The Guardian

Type of storm that drenched New York is up to 20% wetter due to climate crisis

Rapid attribution study finds storm 10-20% wetter after city experienced a month’s worth of rain in just a few hours on Friday

A school bus drives in floodwaters at the FDR Drive in Manhattan on 29 September. Photograph: Andrew Kelly/Reuters

Oliver Milman @olliemilman

Mon 2 Oct 2023

The unmistakable influence of the climate crisis helped cause New York City to be inundated by a month’s worth of rain within just a few hours on Friday, scientists have warned, amid concerns over how well the city is prepared for severe climate shocks.

A new rapid attribution study, released by scientists in Europe, has found that the type of storm seen on Friday is now 10-20% wetter than it would have been in the previous century, because of climate change.

Flash flooding soaked large parts of the US’s largest city, turning roads into rivers, following intense rainfall that broke records. John F Kennedy international airport measured 8in of rainfall in one day, the most since records began, while Brooklyn received a month’s worth of rain in just a few hours. People had to be rescued from swamped basement apartments, subway and bus services were canceled and sewage backed up in overwhelmed pipes.

Climate scientists have stressed that such pounding rainfall is a symptom of a warming planet, with a hotter atmosphere able to hold more moisture that is then unleashed in torrential downpours.

“Human-driven climate change plays a dual role, both intensifying these storms and warming the atmosphere,” said Davide Faranda, a scientist at the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace in France. “Deeper storms yield more intense phenomena, while a warmer atmosphere can accommodate a greater amount of rain.”

Tommaso Alberti, a researcher at Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, said that the extreme event that hit New York “aligns with climate change projections”. He added that while natural variability can deliver major storms, “human-driven climate change is the primary driver, underscoring the urgent need for climate mitigation and adaptation efforts”.

Global heating has fueled contrasting extremes in rainfall across the US. While much of the arid south-west has faced prolonged drought – punctuated by occasional disastrous flooding events – the US north-east, including New York, has seen a significant increase in heavy rainfall. The amount of precipitation falling in heavy events in the region has increased 55% since the 1950s, a federal government analysis has found, with climate change the main cause of this.

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a new book on the climate crisis, said that rapid attribution studies can miss some of the mechanisms that cause extreme weather, but that the increased threat of flooding was nevertheless undeniable.

“New York is experiencing a very clear increase in these extreme – more than 2in per hour – rainfall events, and that’s clearly tied to a warming atmosphere,” he said.

Such flooding can be deadly. In 2021, New York was hit by Hurricane Ida, which caused 11 people to die from flooding that seeped into the basement apartments where many New Yorkers live.

Following scenes where parts of New York again resembled a giant, fetid swimming pool, and less than four months after the city’s skies turned a toxic orange from wildfire smoke, questions have been raised about the preparedness of the metropolis, along with many other major cities, to escalating climate impacts.

“The sad reality is our climate is changing faster than our infrastructure can respond,” Rohit Aggarwala, commissioner of the New York City department of environmental protection, admitted on Friday. Pipes and drains could not cope with the flood water, while the leadership of the city and state – including the city’s mayor, Eric Adams, and the governor, Kathy Hochul – has come under criticism for responding too slowly to the looming threat posed by the rainfall.

“It’s clear that our cities and our aging infrastructure were built for a climate that no longer exists, particularly as a warmed atmosphere holds and releases more water,” said Daniel Zarrilli, the former chief climate policy adviser to New York City.

“This requires not only greater investment to deal with the new extremes, but also the creativity to think differently about design for when the capacity of our infrastructure is inevitably exceeded.”

Here are some other “ET’s” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:

Here is some more new September 2023 climatology:

Here is More Climate and Weather News from Tuesday:

(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. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)

Today’s News on Sustainable, Traditional Polluting Energy from Fossil Fuel, and the Green Revolution:

More from the Weather Department:

More on the Environment:

More on Other Science and the Beauty of Earth and this Universe:

If you like these posts and my work on record temperature ratios, please contribute via my PayPal widget on this site. Thanks in advance for any support. 

Guy Walton… “The Climate Guy”

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