Every time I hear about extreme weather these days my attention jumps right off the event itself, with all it’s human drama, to the question: what does this mean? Where does this fit into the shifting jigsaw puzzle? Is this event a part of a pattern? If, so what is the pattern? Too often, the weather channel and all the other outfits whose sole reason for being is to scream “look at me!” [I have something to sell you…] don’t talk about patterns, about change and speed of change, about shifts in latitude or longitude of the old standards. If the Beale Street Blues was heard in Minnesota it would get more comment than Canadian snow raining in New England, or drought hanging around the green hills of the South. Found an exception today, though. The enormous rain storms we have seen — these rainocerous — are not just freaks of nature. They are newly evolved creatures of the atmosphere….
Felicity Barringer who’s been on the environmental beat for the NY Times for a while brought a report from environmentamerica.org to our attention.
Across the United States, the number of severe rainfalls and heavy snows has grown significantly in the last half-century, with the greatest increases in New England and the Middle Atlantic region, according to a report released yesterday …
It shows that the number of downpours and heavy snows has increased by 22 percent to 26 percent across the country since 1948. Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont were among the states in which occurrences of severe precipitation have increased more than 50 percent, according to the report. In Oregon and Florida, however, the incidence of extreme rainfall dropped slightly, though in Florida the drop was not statistically significant.
the rainstorm that hit Washington, D.C., and much of the east coast in late June, 2006, as an illustration of what more extreme rainstorms could mean for the region. That rainstorm, which broke the one-day, two-day and one-week records for rainfall at Reagan National Airport outside Washington, flooded buildings like IRS, caused mudslides that closed the Capital Beltway, left tens of thousands of homes without power, and even felled a 100-year-old tree on the White House grounds.
“This report demonstrates that we are already seeing the effects of global warming even with a relatively small increase in temperatures. The projected increases are much greater, and the impacts are already much more than was predicted
Anna Aurilio from Environment America
You can read the executive summary and download the whole report (pdf) here.