 |
| Flooding in Phoenix this morning. From Twitter via @photochowder (Michael Chow) |
They had their wettest day on record, and the flooding was incredible.
More than three inches of rain poured down on Phoenix in just a few hours. Some areas nearby had at least five inches of rain.
Such rainfall totals are really impressive for rather wet places, like where I live in Vermont. But to have something like that in the desert is just wild.
At last check, the National Weather Service office in Phoenix recorded 2.96 inches of rain so far today, breaking the single day rainfall record of 2.91 inches set in 1933.
During the (comparatively) wet monsoon season in Phoenix, which runs July through September, normal rainfall for the three months totals about 2.7 inches.
Today, they got just under three inches in seven hours. Like I said, wild.
 |
| Another view of Phoenix, Arizona flooding today from Michael Chow. Via Twitter, @photochowder |
Desert sands and rocks really can't absorb heavy rain very well, so the water runs off into floods. And Phoenix is basically miles and miles of sprawling concrete and asphalt.
As you can imagine, water doesn't exactly soak into concrete or vast stretches of pavement on freeways and parking lots
So you get epic flooding when a storm of this hugeness hits.
The culprit behind all this desert rain is the normal monsoon moisture finding its way northwestward from the Gulf of Mexico to the deserts. That would be enough to cause some downpours.
But moisture from the remnants of Hurricane Norbert, which was off the coast of Baja California a couple days ago, is really adding water to the atmosphere, so you get the downpours you got around Phoenix today.
Like I've said before, this really does seem to be the summer of flash floods across the nation and across the world. That's continuing apace, that's for sure.
 |
| Yet another view of the Phoenix flood, via Twitter from @JillGalus. |
In addition, to Phoenix, flash flooding has been a real problem the past few days elsewhere in Arizona and in the deserts of southern California, especially around Riverside.
Elsewhere in the world, the dire flood situation in Kashmir and Pakistan is getting worse. The most extensive flooding in that region in decades has killed at least 175 people, says Reuters.
There has also been really bad flooding in southern Europe, especially in parts of Italy over the past few days as well.
I hate to sound like a global warming broken record, but once again, I have to. These frequent, extreme rainstorms and flood are consistent with climate change. One outcome of the warming planet is that while some areas experience worsening droughts, storms and floods are continuing to get more intense in many places on Earth.
That trend is expected to continue as the world continues to warm. While it's hard to pin a flood like that experienced in Phoenix solely on global warming, the changing climate probably made that flood, and others around the world, a little more likely than they would have been a few decades ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment