Connect the dots...
NCAR researchers have correlated the rise from human influences to a 3.5 percent increase in the amount of water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere. That vapor and the heat it transports is sucked up by a storm as it intensifies.
By Trenberth’s calculation, global warming has raised the heat available to a major storm by about 7 percent.
“So, when a storm is over land, you are probably getting, on the relative order to the same storm in the 1970s, about 7 percent more water,” Trenberth said. “Maybe that is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Maybe that is the extra water that causes the levee to break.”
climateprogress.org
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — About 1,500 guests of a downtown hotel complex spent the night in a high school to escape the flooding Cumberland River, which was expected to crest Monday following weekend thunderstorms that killed at least 19 people in Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky.
Officials in Tennessee were preparing for more deaths and for the Cumberland River, which winds through the Music City, to crest more than 11 feet Monday afternoon, putting portions of downtown in danger of the kind of damage experienced by thousands of residents whose homes were swamped by flash floods.
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