The 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, which killed hundreds of people in the U.S. and Canada, was a harbinger of a new generation of climate disasters to come, a new study finds.
shows that amplifying feedbacks between factors such as unusually dry soils and a highly contorted jet stream added to the effects of long-term climate change.The wavy jet stream pattern, itself tied to climate change, helped give rise to a record-strong heat dome that parked itself over British Columbia and the Northwest U.S. in early summer.
The study finds that in the Northwest but likely other areas as well, multiple trends are pushing the climate into a zone where such extremes are far more likely. “The background warming, the atmospheric dynamics, and the soil moisture deficiency interacted in a way that amplified this event beyond a normal extreme,” study coauthor Kai Kornhuber, a senior fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations, tells Axios in an interview.In the 1950s, the study states, the prospect of such a heat wave occurring in the Pacific Northwest was virtually impossible, but climate change had transformed that into a 1-in-200-year event by 2021.
If they are missing some of the feedbacks the study identifies, climate models could underplay the risk of a repeat or even worse event. Looking ahead, if climate change is held to 2°C above the pre-industrial average, 2021-type Pacific Northwest heat events are likely to take place at a frequency of about once every 10 years.
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