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Pastimes : Severe weather events, climate change and economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ron who wrote (322)	8/13/2016 12:01:17 PM
From: Sam	1 Recommendation Recommended By Ron Respond to of 566

America’s Latest 500-Year Rainstorm Is Underway Right Now in Louisiana Observers are calling the record floods a “classic signal of climate change”—and high-resolution models predict another one to two feet of rain by Saturday evening. By Eric Holthaus psmag.com excerpt: By mid-morning on Friday, more than a foot of rain had fallen near Kentwood, Louisiana, in just a 12-hour stretch?—?a downpour with an estimated likelihood of just once every 500 years, and roughly three months’ worth of rainfall during a typical hurricane season. It’s the latest in a string of exceptionally rare rainstorms that are stretching the definition of “extreme” weather. It’s exactly the sort of rainstorm that’s occurring more frequentlyas the planet warms. [....] An instant analysis from Climate Nexus refers to today’s Louisiana rainstorm as a “classic signal of climate change.” It’s right. The NWS maintains a statistical database used to calculate the “annual exceedance probability” of a given rainfall event?—?basically, the expected frequency this event would occur in any given year. Today’s rainstorm in Louisiana is at least the eighth 500-year rainfall event across America in little more than a year, including similarly extreme downpours in Oklahoma last May, central Texas (twice: last May and last October), South Carolina last October, northern Louisiana this March, West Virginia in June, and Maryland last month. And these were just the events that the agency decided to write a report on. One notable exception to this list is the Tax Day flood in the Houston metropolitan area this April, at least the fourth major flood in that region in a span of a year. The local flood control district extrapolated the 23.5 inches of rain over 14.5 hours in Pattison, Texas, during the Tax Day storm to be a one-in-10,000-year event. Statistical calculations like these make a major assumption: That the climate of the past is the same as the climate of today. That’s no longer a very good assumption.