Drought conditions improved in Texas and Oklahoma due to several major flood events. Surrounding states and parts of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas continued to experience severe drought conditions. Moderate crop losses occurred across the central agricultural states and the heat caused 53 deaths.
Moderate to extreme drought conditions affected more than half the country. Costly drought impacts occurred in central states, with widespread harvest failure. The summer heatwave caused direct deaths. Heat conditions caused to 95 deaths.
Record low lake levels also occurred in areas of the Southeast. Thirty-five deaths were caused by the heatwave. The heat caused deaths. Related Content. View Publication Resilience Strategies for Wildfire The risk of wildfire is expected to grow across the United States due to reduced precipitation in some regions, and higher temperatures caused by climate change. Category Resilience Solutions. View Publication Weathering the Next Storm: A Closer Look at Business Resilience As we saw once again in —the warmest year globally on record—increases in extreme weather and other climate-related impacts are imposing significant costs on society.
Even as governments, companies and communities strengthen efforts to reduce emissions contributing to climate change, … View Details Download pdf, 2 MB. While businesses are increasingly taking steps to assess risks and prepare for future climate changes, many companies face internal and external challenges that hinder efforts … View Details Download pdf, KB.
Cost in billions USD unadjusted cost. Hurricane Katrina initially hit as a Category 1 near Miami, Fla. Hurricane Harvey made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane near Rockport, Texas. Hurricane Maria initially hit St. Hurricane Sandy caused extensive damage across several northeastern states Conn. Hurricane Ike made landfall in Texas as a Category 2 hurricane. This raises another important point.
When it comes to interpreting the results of event attribution studies, it matters what the question is. For example, a study asked whether recent wet summers in northwestern European were a response to retreating Arctic sea ice pdf, p The paper notes that, in a chaotic weather system, the complex dynamics of the atmosphere mean the size and path of a storm or heavy rainfall event has a large element of chance.
This can make it tricky to identify where climate change fits in, potentially underestimating its influence. Higher temperatures mean warmer seas, higher sea levels and more moisture evaporating into the atmosphere.
These are changes that scientists can be more confident in, the authors write, and so should be the focus for attribution studies — rather than looking at changes to circulation patterns in the atmosphere.
For example, the paper reexamines an earlier study pdf, p15 that suggested climate change had reduced the chances of the five-day heavy rainfall event that hit north-east Colorado in September Trenberth and colleagues argue that while climate change might not have made the specific weather system that brought the rain more likely, it will have contributed to the sheer volume of moisture in the atmosphere.
While attribution studies of heatwaves are generally more straightforward than storms — as they focus on thermodynamic influences — the type of question they are asking is still important. The Russian heatwave in is a good example of this. One study looking at the severity of the event did not find a role for climate change.
Yet another one , which did find an influence, looked at the likelihood of the event. This apparent contradiction is tackled by a third study that reconciles the other two. It is also important to stress that the absence of evidence for a link to climate change is not the same as evidence of absence.
In other words, it does not necessarily mean there was no human influence, just that a particular analysis did not find one. This is why a single study should never be considered the final word on how climate change influences a given type of extreme weather.
Capetonians queue for water at natural springs around the city during the water crisis, January This mixed bag of results reflects the inherent complexity of droughts. And, again, the specific question matters.
Conclusions about the role of climate change in a specific drought could depend on whether a study looks at temperature, precipitation or soil moisture, for example. While much has been achieved in the field of extreme event attribution in a short space of time, scientists are constantly looking for ways to tailor their work to suit the people who might use it. One major goal since the early days of the field has been to expand extreme event attribution to cover a larger and more diverse geographical area.
Where in the world scientists can carry out attribution studies — and for what kind of events — will always be limited by the quality and availability of observed data and appropriate models. The attribution map highlights, for example, that there are relatively few studies of extreme weather in Africa and South America.
But, at the moment, there is also a heavy leaning towards weather events that are local to the modelling groups, or that have a particular scientific interest. Otto explains:. The UK, California and Boulder [in Colorado] are, therefore, studied much more than other parts of the world, but that does not necessarily make them places particularly impacted by climate change. This means that while the studies carried out so far are indicative of the role climate change is playing in extreme weather around the world, they should not be considered representative of all types of extreme weather everywhere, says Otto.
She tells Carbon Brief:. As well as expanding the science to cover different types of weather and more of the world, scientists are getting faster at turning the handle on extreme event attribution studies — sometimes crunching the numbers just days after an event has occurred.
The rapid studies included here are all — bar one — produced by the World Weather Attribution WWA initiative, described earlier. While the WWA individual rapid assessments are not individually peer-reviewed, they are conducted using methods that have been through the peer-review process.
As the BAMS report explains:. By conducting the analysis in the immediate aftermath of a weather event, these rapid studies provide almost-real-time information on the climate change influence, rather than having to wait many months for a formal study.
In some cases, these rapid assessments are later published in peer-reviewed journals. In these cases, the formal study is included in the attribution map, rather than the initial analysis. In some cases, this means earlier rapid assessments are removed from the Carbon Brief map in order to add in the relevant peer-reviewed paper once it is published.
Costly storm and flood damage to burgeoning coastal infrastructure is growing. Innovations such as building floating villages and relocating vulnerable assets away from rising seas can reduce risk and losses. More people will likely be exposed to the effects of climate change in the next century, with potentially catastrophic implications for human health.
Comment on this article. How to live with it Wild Weather Torrential hurricanes, devastating droughts, crippling ice storms, and raging heat waves—all are extreme weather phenomena that can claim lives and cause untold damage.
Catastrophes on the Rise Meteorological records show a rise in weather-related disasters since The cycle of extreme and long-lasting heat caused by climate change draws more and more moisture out of the ground and vegetation.
And these tinder-dry conditions provide fuel for fires, which can spread at an incredible speed. The impact of the heatwave on fire development was seen in an explosive fashion in western Canada this summer. Fires developed so rapidly and explosively they created their own weather system, as pyrocumulonimbus clouds formed. And these colossal clouds produced lightning, igniting more fires. The frequency of large wildfires has increased dramatically in recent decades.
Compared with the s, fires larger than 10, acres 40 sq km are now seven times more common in western America, according to Climate Central, an independent organisation of scientists and journalists. In the usual weather cycle, hot weather creates moisture and water vapour in the air, which turns into droplets to create rain.
The warmer it becomes, however, the more vapour there is in the atmosphere, resulting in more droplets - and heavier rainfall, sometimes in a shorter space of time and over a smaller area. Historic flooding in China, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands has shown the devastating impact extreme rainfall events can have.
And these rainfall events are connected to the impacts of climate change elsewhere, according to Peter Gleick, a water specialist from the US National Academy of Sciences. The weather across the globe will always be highly variable - but climate change is making that more extreme.
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