Causative factors include decayed infrastructure; facility malfunctions; or heavy
rainfall events which overwhelm systems using combined sewers and stormwater drains (known as combined sewer overflows).
Not exact matches
New Zealand experienced an extreme two - day
rainfall in December 2011; researchers said 1 to 5 percent more moisture was available for that
event due to climate change,
which is increasing the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.
Warmer air can carry more moisture,
which can lead to more extreme
rainfall events, and warmer ocean surface temperatures are known to intensify the most powerful hurricanes.
The article, «Extreme
rainfall activity in the Australian tropics reflects changes in the El Niño / Southern Oscillation over the last two millennia,» presents a precisely dated stalagmite record of cave flooding
events that are tied to tropical cyclones,
which include storms such as hurricanes and typhoons.
The another most important climate variation is El Niño — Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
events,
which impact the global oceanic and atmospheric circulations
which thereby produce droughts, floods and intense
rainfall in certain regions.
Global warming also leads to increases in atmospheric water vapor,
which increases the likelihood of heavier
rainfall events that may cause flooding.
Susan Anderson's NYT link: «The flooding in Louisiana is the eighth
event since May of last year in
which the amount of
rainfall in an area in a specified window of time matches or exceeds the NOAA predictions for an amount of precipitation that will occur once every five hundred years, or has a 0.2 percent chance of occurring in any given year.»
A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, for example,
which raises the risk of extreme
rainfall events and the flooding they cause.
Further complicating the use of these proxies is the fact that the deviation in oxygen - 18 ratios is affected by the amount of TC
rainfall, the distance from the center of the cyclone at
which the rain was produced, and the intensity of the cyclone — so I doubt these proxies alone will enable disentangling intensity and
rainfall, tnough a large number of samples over an area could reveal information about the track and extent of the TC
event.
As temperatures rise, basic physics dictates an increase in the amount of atmospheric moisture,
which is the fuel for heavy
rainfall events.
«The authors write that «the El Niño - Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a naturally occurring fluctuation,» whereby «on a timescale of two to seven years, the eastern equatorial Pacific climate varies between anomalously cold (La Niña) and warm (El Niño) conditions,» and that «these swings in temperature are accompanied by changes in the structure of the subsurface ocean, variability in the strength of the equatorial easterly trade winds, shifts in the position of atmospheric convection, and global teleconnection patterns associated with these changes that lead to variations in
rainfall and weather patterns in many parts of the world,»
which end up affecting «ecosystems, agriculture, freshwater supplies, hurricanes and other severe weather
events worldwide.»»
The report,
which was supported by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, stresses that extreme weather
events such as floods or droughts are just as significant as rising average temperatures and
rainfall.
The article also reported on the 22 papers published by the AMS «seeking to explain extreme global weather
events from a climate perspective» of
which two studied the heavy
rainfall in Eastern Australia.
Megadroughts are rare
events, episodes that last several decades and in
which the evaporation of soil moisture outpaces any
rainfall.
He says average
rainfall for Australia will decrease, but the extreme weather
events will be on the rise, so while you might get less rain over the year it will come in the form of damaging storms and stronger winds
which feel like so - called freak
events.
An Amplified Hadely Cell means large areas of the mid-latitudes would see subsiding air aloft,
which acts as a cap to large scale
rainfall events.
The
events were triggered by a period of intense
rainfall and a rapid rise in temperatures,
which rose by 27 ˚C in a little over two days.
The third story covers the release of a recent paper in Nature Geoscience on short - duration extreme
rainfall events, on
which PCIC Director Francis Zwiers is a co-author.
Once done, I hope to be able to offer an approach
which will better predict the recurrence time of rare
rainfall events in the the face of increasing temperatures.
I have, just in the past week +, discovered a remarkable property of the Levy distribution, not shared by any other stable distribution,
which motivates using it to characterize
rainfall events.
The non-linearities are emergent properties of the complex interconnectivity of the many parts of the earth climate system — The presence and amplitude of El Nino changes the
rainfall in the southeastern US,
which affects evapotranspiration and cloudiness over the warm parts of the Atlantic,
which affects the amount of sensible and latent heat
which goes into the atmosphere,
which the prevailing winds carry to Great Britain, and so on through a chain of
events which eventually influence the barometric pressure differences between the Eastern and Western Pacific
which drive the ENSO.
The storm fits the current pattern experienced in the warming world in
which higher temperatures are driving more intense
rainfall events.