Stu Ostro, Senior Meteorologist at the Weather Channel, has written a must-read post on the recent record Georgia deluges, “Off the chain without a ‘cane” (reprinted below). He makes a key point that had not occurred to me about the devastating September rainstorms:
Usually during that month when there’s wild weather, including precipitation extremes, it’s as a result of a hurricane or tropical storm. Not in 2009.
The main point of my post, Hell and High Water hits Georgia, was that, as climate scientists have predicted for a long time, wild climate swings are becoming the norm, in this case with once-in-a-century drought followed by once-in-a-century flooding.
Back in 2007, the NYT reported, “For the first time in more than 100 years, much of the Southeast has reached the most severe category of drought…. The situation has gotten so bad that by all of [state climatologist David] Stooksbury’s measures — the percentage of moisture in the soil, the flow rate of rivers, inches of rain — this drought has broken every record in Georgia’s history.“ So it was more than a once-in-a-century event.
As for the flooding, as one CP commenter posted, the USGS quantified that “the rivers and streams had magnitudes so great that the odds of it happening were less than 0.2 percent in any given year. In other words, there was less than a 1 in 500 chance that parts of Cobb and Douglas counties were going to be hit with such an event.”
I have called this type of rapid deluge, “global warming type” record rainfall, since it is one of the most basic predictions of climate science — and its an impact that has already been documented to have started.
But in fact this deluge is even more of a global-warming-type rain event because, as Ostro notes, unlike typical Georgia deluges, this one was not associated with a tropical storm or hurricane. Ostro is “Senior Director of Weather Communications. Stu leads the team of tornado, hurricane, and climate experts at The Weather Channel.” Because these extreme rain events becoming more common, and because Ostro’s excellent explanation is really too long and technical to simply excerpt, I’m going to repost the entire thing below: (more…)



Polar bears are the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of climate-change-endangered Arctic species. They get all the press (see 



One of the most tragic reasons global warming legislation doesn’t have more public support is the (mis)perception that it will primarily affect the poor and disadvantaged around the globe. In fact, 






Even in Australia, where people have learned to live with large wildfires, February’s “
RSS
Subscribe by Email
Follow Climate Progress on Twitter
