Parts of Texas mired in drought are suddenly flooded. It's becoming more common as regions lurch from drought to deluge. What's happening?
BY SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Parts of northern Texas, mired in a drought labeled as extreme and exceptional, are flooding under torrential rain. In a drought.
In the Horn of Africa in the midst of a devastating but oft-ignored famine and drought, nearby flash floods add to the humanitarian disaster unfolding. Europe, which suffered through unprecedented flooding last year, has baked with record heat compounded by a 500-year drought that is drying up rivers and threatening power supplies.
"These extremes of course are getting more extreme," said National Center for Atmospheric Research climate scientist Gerald Meehl, who wrote some of the first studies 18 years ago about extreme weather and climate change."This is in line with what we expected." In the United States, many of the big heavy summer rains are traditionally connected to hurricanes or tropical systems, like last year's Hurricane Ida that smacked Louisiana and then plowed through the South until it flooded the New York, New Jersey region with record rainfall rates.
Another factor is the stuck and wavier jet stream — the atmospheric river that moves weather systems around the world — said Woodwell's Francis. Storm systems don't move and just dump huge amounts of water in some places. Other places, like China, are stuck with hot weather as cooler, wetter weather moves around them.
This will only get worse as climate change worsens, so"it highlights the type of events that we need to adapt to, that we need to harden ourselves against," said Princeton University climate scientist Gabriel Vecchi.
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