| | Forget Tornadoes. Rain Bombs Are Coming for Your Town
Climate change is weaponizing the atmosphere.
Eric Roston eroston
July 29, 2016 — 6:00 AM EDT
bloomberg.com
Evidence shows that the sky is coming down on our heads—the watery part of it, anyway, in larger and larger cascades. It’s largely our own fault.
The past two months have seen some doozies just in the U.S. The Empire State Building was struck by lightning twice on Monday during a storm that brought an inch of rain down in what felt like a single sheet.
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 Henrik Moltke @moltke
Boom
5:35 PM - 25 Jul 2016
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Last month, at least 23 people died in West Virginia flooding. At its peak on June 23, more than 8 inches to 10 inches fell within half a day—a once-every-1,000 years rain storm. Maelstroms in May and early June dropped five times as much rain as normal near Houston, seriously challenging the definition of normal. More than a dozen people died. It was the city's fifth major flood in just over a year. (Rainfall is trending higher nationally, though paving over much of Texas probably doesn't help.)
The most dramatic recent image came from Bruce Haffner, a Phoenix TV helicopter pilot, who snapped what looks very much like a 20-megaton warhead going off. This is informally known as a “rain bomb":
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 Bruce Haffner
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@chopperguyhd Here's a closer look at today's microburst over Phoenix
11:25 PM - 18 Jul 2016 · Scottsdale, AZ, United States
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The phenomenon is known in meteorology circles as the more sober “wet microburst.” They are supposed to happen rarely; conditions must be just right. A thunderstorm runs into a dry patch of air that sucks some moisture away. The air underneath the storm cloud cools, making it more dense than the air around it. The cooler air begins to drop into even warmer air and then accelerates. When the faucet really flips on, air can blast out of the sky at more than 115 miles per hour. It deflects off the ground and pushes winds outward, at or near tornado strength. The Phoenix event above was actually a “macroburst,” with a radar footprint wider than about 2.5 miles, said Amber Sullins, chief meteorologist at ABC-15 News.
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