A quarter inch of rain in fifteen minutes can turn a freshly burned slope into a river of mud and boulders. The warning system has long leaned on a model built from Southern California canyons, then applied to the entire West. A new USGS update refits it for three regions and beats the old version by roughly 15 to 60 percent, with fewer false alarms. A strong El Niño is on the way, so read this before the next storm.
<June 2022- Please note, some of the tools and methods in this post may be out of date as the original was written 4 years ago. An update to this post is planned in the next month or two, so please check back or subscribe by email to be notified of any updates or new blog posts. Thanks!> There are many climate change maps and tools that you can use to figure out your personal risk to climate change. The Climate Advisor searched the web for the best interactive climate change visualization tools. Sites that give information in a map… Read More »The Best Climate Change Mapping Tools For You
With all of the extreme rain and snow storms across the US lately, the obvious question arises… are these events linked to climate change? New research shows us the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. And it actually makes perfect sense. Carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere, and a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. When you combine warmer, moist air with disruption of the Jet Stream cased by a warming Arctic, you get huge, slow-moving weather fronts packed with moisture. This is the exact recipe for epic, extreme storms. As an example, on Memorial Day in 2015, a massive storm parked over southern Texas and dropped nearly 11 inches of… Read More »Climate Change and Deadly Floods: What you need to know