St. Louis, Eastern KY, Illinois, Death Valley, Dallas - 5 1,000-Year Rainstorms In The US In 5 Weeks
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While no single weather event is caused by mankind’s influence on the atmosphere, the weather facing the nation bears the fingerprint of a warming world. While it seems contradictory, both drought and flooding are closely tied to human-driven warming and are altering our environment and how we interact with it. We are witnessing firsthand the effects of ordinary weather events — a product of chaotic randomness and natural variability — supercharged by climate change.
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It’s well-established that a warmer world is a wetter world. That’s due to something called the Clausius-Clapeyron relation. For every degree Fahrenheit the air temperature warms, the air can hold about 4 percent more water. That’s leading to higher humidity and heat indexes — which can be taxing on the human body — but is also manifesting in precipitation extremes.
It’s not noticeable in the day-to-day, but let’s consider that we take a storm in preindustrial times and copy it into today’s environment. With about 1.8 degrees of warming since preindustrial times, the air would have a 7 to 8 percent greater capacity to store and transport moisture. In a water-loaded environment like a thunderstorm complex or tropical system, you might think that would mean 7 or 8 percent more rainfall. But that’s where things get murky. Because an air mass is being constantly replenished and fed into these storms, that can quickly lead to a 10 or 20 percent increase in precipitation totals.
We’re seeing this quite prominently in rainfall rates, meaning the wetter atmosphere is leading to heavier instantaneous downpours. Dallas, for example, saw its highest one-hour total on record between 1 and 2 a.m. on Monday, with 3.01 inches coming down. Records at DFW International extend back to 1953, but seven of the top 10 wettest one-hour totals have occurred in the 2000s. There’s already been a 24 percent spike in the frequency of top 1 percent rainfall events in Texas since the dawn of the 20th century. That trend is echoed across the country and world.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/23/flood-united-states-climate-explainer/