Research via the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization

Devastating extreme rain events are part of a growing trend in the Midwest, according to a new report looking at 50 years of storm data.

Over the last five decades, the types of deluges that washed out towns in Iowa, forced the Army Corps of Engineers to intentionally blow up levees to save Cairo, Illinois, and sent the Missouri River over its banks for hundreds of miles, have been increasing, according to analysis by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization (RMCO) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

Big storms, leading to big floods, are occurring with increasing frequency in the Midwest, with incidences of the most severe downpours doubling over the last half century. The report’s lead author, Stephen Saunders, explained that “a threshold may have been crossed”:

“Global studies already show that human-caused climate change is driving more extreme precipitation, and now we’ve documented how great the increase has been in the Midwest and linked the extreme storms to flooding in the region.

In addition to region-wide trends, the report presents trends in the eight Midwestern states.  For the worst storms (three inches or more of rain in 24 hours) from 1961-2011, the report outlines the following state-level trends:  Indiana (+160 percent); Wisconsin (+203 percent); Missouri (+81 percent); Michigan (+180 percent); Minnesota (+104 percent); Illinois (+83 percent); Ohio (+40 percent); and Iowa (+32 percent).

Key findings include:

• Since 1961, the Midwest has had an increasing number of large storms.  The largest of storms, those of three inches or more of precipitation in a single day, increased the most, with their annual frequency having increased by 103 percent over the roughly half century period through 2011. For storms of at least two inches but less than three inches in a day, the trend was a 81 percent increase; for storms of one to two inches, a 34 percent increase. Smaller storms did not have a significant increase.

• The rates of increase for all large storms accelerated over time, with the last analyzed decade, 2001-2010, showing the greatest jumps. For the largest storms, in 2001-2010 there were 52 percent more storms per year than in the baseline period.

• The frequency of extreme storms has increased so much in recent years that the first 12 years of this century included seven of the nine top years (since 1961) for the most extreme storms in the Midwest.

• With more frequent extreme storms, the average return period between two such storms has become shorter. In 1961-1970, extreme storms averaged once every 3.8 years at an individual location in the Midwest. That is two to four times more frequent than a major hurricane making landfall at a typical location along the U.S. coast from North Carolina to Texas. By 2001-2010, the average return period for Midwestern extreme storms at a single location was down to 2.2 years—or four to eight times more frequent than landfalling major hurricanes.

The report also presents new evidence linking extreme storms in the Midwest to major floods, the region’s most costly regularly occurring natural disasters.

The new analysis shows that the two worst years in the Midwest for storms of three inches or more per day were 2008 and 1993, the years with the Midwest’s worst floods in some 80 years, which caused $16 billion and $33 billion in damages and rank,  among the nation’s worst natural disasters. The report presents new evidence linking the 2008 flooding to extreme storms, showing that in areas with the worst flooding 48 percent of the local precipitation came from extreme storms.

In 2010, which ranked fourth among years in regional extreme-storm frequency, Iowa alone had $1 billion in agricultural losses from extreme storms. In 2011, which ranked fifth, Midwestern flooding caused $2 billion in damages. This shows how the Midwest is increasingly vulnerable to flooding if extreme precipitation continues to increase with human-caused climate change, as scientists consistently project will happen.

This research brief was originally published at the Rocky Mountain Climate Institute.

Even with the wettest April on record, some areas of England are still facing “exceptional” drought conditions. After two years of dry winters — including the fifth-driest March — the ground hasn’t been able to soak up the heavy rainfall that hit in April.

The situation in the country illustrates the cruel reality of “rollercoaster” extreme weather — a problem that will only be exacerbated by accumulating heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. Recent research also finds that the loss of Arctic ice favors extreme, prolonged weather events “such as drought, flooding, cold spells and heat waves.”

The rain has certainly helped some regions. But other parts of England were so dry, it could take months of record rainfall to bring groundwater levels back to normal. One aquifer close to London is 90 percent below normal levels for this time of year.

Experts in the country are explaining why the combination of extremely dry and extremely wet conditions make it harder to recover from drought. Climatewire reported on the problem:

“Heavy rain on parched ground is like pouring water on an old, dry sponge. Much of it will bounce off. The sponge needs to be wet in order to hold the water. Farmers are in a much better position than they were thanks to the rains. River levels have risen, soil moisture has increased and their water reserves have been replenished. But aquifers take much longer to fill,” said a spokeswoman for England’s Environment Agency.

According to figures from the Environment Agency, 42 percent of groundwater “indicator sites” are “exceptionally low.”

“Over the last two winters, the amount of rainfall we have had has been down 20 to 30 percent on what we would normally have. Most of the recharge of groundwater happens over the winter. We lost three to four months of groundwater recharge in total over that two-year period,” [explained Andrew McKenzie of the British Geological Survey McKenzie to Climatewire.]

“We have now had the wettest April ever, and you might think that would go halfway to recharging the groundwater. But we also had a very dry March, and the soils had already switched to summer, dry mode and had to switch back,” he added.

Ironically, when the rains hit in April after a dry March, the Environment Agency issued 13 severe flood warnings and 42 flood alerts for areas around the country — all while homeowners were banned from watering their gardens.

This will eventually be normal weather under a business as usual emissions scenario.

According to a study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, our current rate of emissions puts us on a path to dust bowl conditions in many areas of the world, while “precipitation may become more intense but less frequent (i.e., longer dry spells) under GHG-induced global warming. This may increase flash floods and runoff, but diminish soil moisture and increase the risk of agricultural drought.”

Related Posts:

• Must-See Video: Has Global Warming Caused A Quantum Jump In Extreme Weather?
• NOAA: Human-Caused Climate Change Already a Major Factor in More Frequent Mediterranean Droughts
• Study: Global warming is driving increased frequency of extreme wet or dry summer weather in southeast, so droughts and deluges are likely to get worse

Figure 1. The ten warmest 12-month periods in the contiguous U.S. since record keeping began in 1895. Image credit: NOAA/NCDC.

by Jeff Masters, via WunderBlog

The past twelve months were the warmest twelve months in U.S. history, said NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) on Tuesday, in their monthly “State of the Climate” report. Temperatures in the contiguous U.S. during May 2011 – April 2012 broke the previous record for warmest 12-month period, set November 1999 – October 2000, by 0.1°F. The past twelve months have featured America’s 2nd warmest summer, 4th warmest winter, and warmest March on record. Twenty-two states were record warm for the 12-month period, and an additional nineteen states were top ten warm. NOAA said that the January – April 2012 period was also the warmest January – April period since record keeping began in 1895. The average temperature of 45.4°F during January – April 2012 was 5.4°F above the 20th century average for the period, and smashed the previous record set in 2006 by an unusually large margin–1.6°F.

Figure 2. The average temperature of 45.4°F during January – April 2012 was the warmest on record: 5.4°F above the 20th century average for the period, and was 1.6°F above the previous record set in 2006. January – April temperatures have been rising at about 1.9°F per century since 1895. Image credit: NOAA/NCDC.

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The Nation’s leading scientists have issued a stark warning: America’s ability to monitor the environment is rapidly diminishing. And if we don’t properly fund our satellite capabilities, the country could lose three quarters of its Earth observation systems by 2020.

That alarming conclusion comes from the National Research Council in a new report assessing the progress of the nation’s Earth observation programs. In short: our leading scientific institutions aren’t actually making much progress.

Rather, a lack of funding and infrastructure will result in “a rapid decline” in our ability to monitor extreme weather and changes to the climate.

The committee found that the number of NASA and NOAA Earth observing instruments in space is likely to decline to as little as 25 percent of the current number by 2020….  The U.S. system of environmental satellites is at risk of collapse.

The projected loss of observing capability could have significant adverse consequences for science and society. The loss of observations of key Earth system components and processes will weaken the ability to understand and forecast changes arising from interactions and feedbacks within the Earth system and limit the data and information available to users and decision makers. Consequences are likely to include slowing or even reversal of the steady gains in weather forecast accuracy over many years and degradation of the ability to assess and respond to natural hazards and to measure and understand changes in Earth’s climate and life support systems.

The report is a mid-term update of the NSA’s 2007 decadal survey — a proposed 10-year plan for improving earth sciences programs at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The NSA assessment did find that NASA was able to launch new satellites into space and work on international partnerships to make up for shortfalls in money; however, those won’t be enough to meet needed technology improvements.

There are three major factors contributing to this unprecedented decline in Earth monitoring capabilities: budget cuts, a rapidly aging fleet of satellites, and a lack of launch capabilities.

The budgetary issues have been ongoing. According to the NSA progress report, NASA’s Earth science program still hasn’t been funded to the requested $2 billion to meet future objectives.

And as Climate Progress reported last year, Republican lawmakers proposed slashing $1.2 billion from NOAA’s funding levels, cutting into satellite programs. The satellite programs were eventually funded to requested levels, but future funding is uncertain. Senate lawmakers have proposed moving NOAA’s satellite program over to NASA where operational efficiencies could potentially save money.

Officials at these agencies say that more money is needed to replace the fleet of aging satellites that will inevitably fail in the coming years. According to the NSA report, there’s also a severe lack of launch vehicles for Earth satellites that “directly threatens programmatic robustness.”

After all, satellites aren’t much good without a way to launch them.

What’s the solution? Increasing the budget for new satellite infrastructure is the most obvious. But a major boost in funding for these programs is unlikely. So the NSA report recommends establishing new partnerships and “balancing costs with science objectives and priorities” by focusing on a more diverse range of projects rather than a few high-profile missions.

Programmatic efficiency is key. But it still doesn’t fully address what could become a national crisis. As our planet overheats — making extreme weather more intense, deadly and expensive — our ability to monitor the health of planet is collapsing.

If we’re going to tell this story — and it’s the most important story of our time — we’re going to have to tell it ourselves.

by Bill McKibben, via TomDispatch

The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as if by a giant’s fist, and most obvious of all, a utilitarian temporary bridge where for 140 years a graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.

The YouTube video of that bridge crashing into the raging river was Vermont’s iconic image from its worst disaster in memory, the record flooding that followed Hurricane Irene’s rampage through the state in August 2011.  It claimed dozens of lives, as it cut more than a billion-dollar swath of destruction across the eastern United States.

I watched it on TV in Washington just after emerging from jail, having been arrested at the White House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline.  Since Vermont’s my home, it took the theoretical — the ever more turbulent, erratic, and dangerous weather that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help ensure — and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.

And I’m not the only one.

New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they’re drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” No less striking, 35% of the respondents reported that extreme weather had affected them personally in 2011. As Yale’s Anthony Laiserowitz told the New York Times, “People are starting to connect the dots.”

Which is what we must do. As long as this remains one abstract problem in the long list of problems, we’ll never get to it.  There will always be something going on each day that’s more important, including, if you’re facing flood or drought, the immediate danger.

But in reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that’s going on every single day.  If we could only see that pattern we’d have a fighting chance. It’s like one of those trompe l’oeil puzzles where you can only catch sight of the real picture by holding it a certain way. So this weekend we’ll be doing our best to hold our planet a certain way so that the most essential pattern is evident. At 350.org, we’re organizing a global day of action that’s all about dot-connecting; in fact, you can follow the action at climatedots.org.

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Our guest blogger is Brad Johnson, campaign manager of Forecast the Facts

Countless lives were saved this weekend by vigilant government officials who warned of deadly tornadoes in Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska — states whose politics are dominated by anti-government, anti-science ideologues. Over 100 tornadoes struck down in 24 hours, but only six people died in Oklahoma, Sen. Jim Inhofe’s home state, thanks to warnings from the National Weather Service scientists he has worked to discredit:

The tornadoes were unrelenting – more than 100 in 24 hours over a stretch of the Plains states. They tossed vehicles and ripped through homes. They drove families to their basements and whipped debris across small towns throughout the Midwest. In some areas, baseball-size hail rained from the sky.

And yet, in a stroke that some officials have attributed to a more vigilant and persistent warning system, relatively few people were killed or injured.

Wichita, Kansas, the headquarters of Koch Industries, suffered $280 million in damage from a ferocious twister, but the “ever-increasing government” demonized by the Koch brothers prevented any loss of life.

Greenhouse pollution from the fossil fuel industries that control the region’s politics is making our weather more extreme and dangerous. The heat trapped by carbon pollution is powering these earlier and more intense storms with record-warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico. As Dr. Jeff Masters wrote on Friday:

This is the warmest March value on record for the Gulf of Mexico, going back over a century of record keeping. During the first two weeks of April, Gulf of Mexico waters remained about 1.5°C above average, putting April on pace to have the warmest April water temperatures on record. Only one year in the past century has had April water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico more than 1.1°C above average; that year was 2002 (1.4°C above average.) All that record-warm water is capable of putting record amounts of water vapor into the air, since evaporation increases when water is warmer. Because moist air is less dense than dry air, this warm, moist air flowing northwards from the Gulf of Mexico into the developing storm system over the Plains will be highly unstable once it encounters cold, dry air aloft. The record-warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico are a key reason for the high risk of severe weather over the Plains this weekend.

Related Post:

• Tornadoes, Extreme Weather and Climate Change, Revisited

CNN meteorologist Alexandra Steele said Tuesday that in fact all this extreme weather we are seeing is due to climate change.

Host Carol Costello said, it’s “such a strange spring,” leading Steele to say

“It really is. That’s kind of the climate change we are seeing. You know, extremes are kind of ruling the roost and really what we are seeing, more become the norm.”

Costello said it made her “afraid” about what might happen next spring, to which Steele replied:

“This global warming is really kind of a misnomer. It’s global climate change. So the colds are colder and warms are warmer and severe is more severe.”

Watch it:

Thanks to this off the charts extreme weather and the growing body of scientific literature attributing it to human-caused global warming, we are starting to see more and more journalists, meteorologists and climate scientists make the connection.

Record-setting hailstone from the Hawaii 'supercell' thunderstorm that hit Oahu on March 9. Credit: NOAA.

by Jeff Masters, via the WunderBlog

A hailstone with the diameter of roughly that of a grapefruit that hit Oahu on March 9, 2012, has been confirmed as the largest hailstone on record for the state of Hawaii, according to NOAA.

The record-setting hailstone was dropped by a “supercell” thunderstorm on the windward side of Oahu. There were numerous reports of hail with diameters of 2 to 3 inches and greater. Hail the size of a penny (diameter of 3/4 inch) or quarter (diameter of one inch) has been reported in Hawaii only eight times since records began, and there is no record of hail larger than 1 inch in diameter. Hail the size of golf balls and baseballs can only form within intense thunderstorms called supercells. These supercells need warm, moist air to rise into progressively colder, drier air, as well as winds changing direction and increasing speed with increasing height off the ground.

For both sets of conditions to exist at the same time in Hawaii is extremely rare, but that did occur on March 9. Conditions that day were ideal for a supercell to form, and the storm looked very much like supercell thunderstorms common in the Central U.S. during spring. Supercells can also produce tornadoes, another rarity in Hawaii. The same hail-producing supercell produced a confirmed EF-0 tornado with winds of 60-70 mph in Lanikai and Enchanted Lakes on Oahu.

Jeff Masters is the co-founder of the Weather Underground, where this piece was originally published.

IPCC (2001) graph illustrating how a shift and/or widening of a probability distribution of temperatures affects the probability of extremes. (Via RealClimate)

The full 592-page (!) IPCC extreme weather report is out. Like most Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports it has some value for people who don’t follow the science closely, which is to say the overwhelming majority of the media and policymakers.

Of course, the TV media ignored the summary report in November, so we will have to see if they pay any attention to this one now that the United States has just been through the most extreme winter heat wave in our recorded history.

But as Kevin Trenberth, one of the world’s leading experts on the link between climate change and extreme weather, put it to me in an email:

I have seen the chapter on the physical climate and I found it quite disappointing…. I don’t think it adds to AR4 [IPCC Fourth Assessment] much.

I agree with Trenberth that if, for instance, you want a more up to date and straightforward discussion of the impact of climate change on precipitation, you should just read his 2011 paper, “Changes in precipitation with climate change” (online here).

Indeed, the actual scientific literature from 2011 is generally more useful than this report — see “NOAA Study Finds Human-Caused Climate Change Already a Major Factor in More Frequent Mediterranean Droughts” and Hansen et al: “Extreme Heat Waves … in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 Were ‘Caused’ by Global Warming.”

It is, as I wrote when the summary came out in November, the report is “Another Blown Chance to Explain the Catastrophes Coming If We Keep Doing Nothing.”  I also wrote that the summary has a good chart that hints at dust-bowlification, but is mostly silent on warming’s gravest threat to humanity.

The full report has more on drought, but fails to clearly describe what the literature now suggests is coming if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path. In 2010, the National Center for Atmospheric Research did a far more valuable literature review and analysis of what we face, which makes clear we risk multiple, devastating global droughts even on moderate emissions path.

In the case of extreme weather, my guess is that decades from now, people will look back on the staggering growth in off-the-charts “outlandish” extreme events in the past few years and conclude that a regime change had occurred in the climate. That change is probably a combination of the sharp loss in summer/fall Arctic sea ice and the sharp increase in ocean heat content.

We’re only in the past year or so seen analyses that demonstrate the human fingerprint in these uber-extreme events, including the studies above and these two:

• Nature Climate Change: Strong Evidence Manmade ‘Unprecedented Heat And Rainfall Extremes Are Here … Causing Intense Human Suffering’
• Study Finds 80% Chance Russia’s 2010 July Heat Record Would Not Have Occurred Without Climate Warming

So rather than citing this timely, but already out-of-date IPCC report, let me just repost below an excellent new piece from RealClimate by the authors of those two studies, who have been doing some of the best recent work in this area.

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It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without anthropogenic global warming.

That’s the conclusion of a major new analysis of the scientific evidence in Nature Climate Change, “A decade of weather extremes” (subs. req’d). The research is by Dim Coumou and Stefan Rahmstorf of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

The study includes this table of extreme events — “The selection criterion for this (incomplete) list was that the event was documented to be record-breaking (that is, unprecedented) in a long measurement series”:

The study points out how devastating some of these events have been for people:

The Moscow heatwave and Pakistan flooding that year illustrated how destructive extreme weather can be to societies: the death toll in Moscow has been estimated at 11,000 and drought caused grain-harvest losses of 30%, leading the Russian government to ban wheat exports. At the same time Pakistan was hit by the worst flooding in its history, which affected approximately one-fifth of its total land area and 20 million people.

It explains that the context for these events is unprecedented human-caused global warming:

The unprecedented meteorological events listed in Table 1 occurred in a decade that was likely the warmest globally for at least a millennium

A number of these individual events have been the subject of “attribution” analysis  making clear that they would have been extremely unlikely to have happened without human caused global warming (see Hansen et al: “Extreme Heat Waves … in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 Were ‘Caused’ by Global Warming” and ”Study Finds 80% Chance Russia’s 2010 July Heat Record Would Not Have Occurred Without Climate Warming,” also by Rahmstorf and Coumou).

In addition, we’ve had analyses link recent drought and dust-bowlification to warming — see NOAA Bombshell: Human-Caused Climate Change Already a Major Factor in More Frequent Mediterranean Droughts:

“The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone,” said Martin Hoerling, Ph.D. of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., lead author.

The new study was of course completed before the blow-out, all-time record winter/spring heat wave, which many leading experts have said bears the fingerprints of human-caused warming.

Clearly, the more unprecedented climate extremes that we see, the stronger the case grows for the overall human fingerprint (see also Eight Must-Have Charts Summarize the Evidence for a “Human Fingerprint” on Recent Climate Change).

The powerful conclusion of this study builds off of Hansen’s famous 1988 testimony:

In 1988, Jim Hansen famously stated in a congressional hearing that “it is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here”. We conclude that now, more than 20 years later, the evidence is strong that anthropogenic, unprecedented heat and rainfall extremes are here — and are causing intense human suffering.

What is most worrisome is that manmade warming is causing intense human suffering now, and we have only warmed 1.4°F in the past century. We’re projected to warm more than 5 times that this century if we are foolish enough to stay anywhere near our current emissions path.

Climate Progress has written many times about the 2009 study on the increase in the ratio of heat records to cold records in the United States, “spurred by a warming climate.”

The new study has an good analysis and chart on the increase in the number of monthly heat records worldwide:

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