Image courtesy of Rapides County Sheriff’s Office.
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“We find that the probability of a comparable event to occur anywhere in the region has increased over time and that this increase is caused by climate change”. If you would like to discuss another topic, look for a relevant article.
Following unprecedented flooding that took the lives of 13 people and displaced more than 100,000 residents, the mainstream media were late to the scene for all the wrong reasons. “The moisture component is where climate change comes in – warmer air can hold more water vapor”. The flooding caused more than $8.7 billion in damage, and he says the state can’t recover without the money. Details of the analysis, which is now under peer review, can be found in the open-access journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences.
Specifically, climate change doubled the chance of such a rainstorm taking place, she said.
The no-name storm began around August 11th when a low-pressure air mass rumbled up the Gulf of Mexico, stalling out over the Louisiana coast for several days. Rivers overflowed and flooding ensued. “But recent flooding in Louisiana should be a reminder to everyone that weather events can strike anyone, even those who have never flooded before”.
Scientists studying the storm using readings from rain gauges as well as powerful computer models have determined just how unlikely the rains were, teasing out the component of the event that was likely human-caused. A typical 30-year event in 1900 would have had 10% less rain than a similar event today, for example, 23 inches instead of 25. However, the changing odds for these events will affect insurance companies and the rates they set, as well as local and state government policies in the future as climate change increases the chances that storms such as these will occur. Also, the intensity of some events has increased. That, Van der Wiel says, would be a far more complicated task.
For their assessment, these scientists conducted a statistical analysis of rainfall observations and used two climate models to understand how the odds have changed for such three-day events between the early 20th century and the early 21st century.
“The burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal releases greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, which has warmed to levels that can not be explained by natural variability, scientists say”, USA Today reports.
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For the last few weeks, the company has bought and received truckloads of supplies and transported the items to Louisiana.
