Nebraska Among Many Places Facing Continued Big Flood Disasters

A highway interchange near Omaha, Nebraska Saturday

Locally here in Vermont, as of this Sunday morning there were no reports of any real ice jam flooding from the just ended warm spell and snow melt.

That's a tiny bright spot in a year that nationally and globally, is turning into another Year Of The Flood. 


I was struck by the record flooding in different parts of the nation and world in 2017, then worriedly shocked that it the flooding in different areas seemed actually worse in 2018.

EVERYWHERE, IT SEEMS

Now it's 2019, and we're off to a very tough start when it comes to flooding. Tennessee and surrounding areas were swamped by flooding, some of it at record levels.

California got it in on the flooding this winter, too, as the Russian River in the north inundated areas around the Napa Valley and mudslides combined with flash floods created repeated messes up and down the state.

AccuWeather notes that the Ohio River around Cairo, Illinois has been above flood stage for over a month, and will conitinue to fluctuate between moderate and major flooding through the end of this month.

It's not just in the USA. Some recent examples: Immense flash flooding in Sao Paulo, Brazil killed 12 people earlier this month. More than 100 people died from flooding caused by a cyclone in Mozambique and Zimbabwe this week. Flash flooding killed at least 50 people in Indonesia this weekend. In Wales, serious flooding this weekend sent at least river to record high levels.

Back in the United States, more high water is poised to come downstream in many areas throughout the middle of the nation. Snowmelt in the northern tier will keep the risk of flooding going for at least a month along the Canadian border pretty much from Washington to Maine.

The newest developing hotspot for potential flooding appears to be Montana. The spring thaw is late there after just about the coldest February and early March on record. Plus it snowed a TON in Montana and surrounding areas during the second half of winter.

This week, temperatures in much of Montana are expected to rise into the low 50s. That's not exceptionally warm for this time of year, but toasty enough to rapidly melt that deep snow cover. Flooding is expected to begin this week.

DOWNSTREAM DISASTER

The water from Montana and snow melt from North Dakota, western and central South Dakota Minnesota and Wisconsin will eventually flow into midsized rivers, then big rivers like the Missouri.

This will probably keep the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers flooding for weeks. That flooding on the Mississippi, already ongoing all the way to near the Gulf Coast will be prolonged by this spring snow melt.  

Flooding in Nebraska this weekend. 

Spring floods are nothing new in the northern and middle parts of the nation. Neither are big storms like the so-called "bomb cyclone" that set off the worst of the flooding last week. While you definitely can't say with any certainty that this latest disaster in Nebraska was "caused" by climate change, it's possible that climate change influenced it.

As the Omaha World-Herald notes, this has all some fingerprints of climate change on it.  Storms are getting wetter, some of the extremes of weather are getting more extreme, and the end result is that what would have been small disasters might be becoming bigger disasters. Like this week's floods in and around Nebraska.

Here's an except from the World-Herald:

"....human-caused climate change is warming the planet at an accelerating pace, and that has set the stage for even more extreme weather.

'For sure, the strongest storms are getting stronger with global warming, said noted climate scientist James Hansen, a native of Iowa. As the Earth warms, its atmosphere has become richer with moisture, which means there's more latent energy for storms to tap.

Some studies indicate that the factors that led to the type of storm that struck the Great Plains last week are increasing, said Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center. 

'There is evidence now in modeling studies that climate change is increasing these factors, supporting the development of more intense bomb cyclones and Nor'easters, packing tropicl storm-scale winds dumping huge amounts of precipitation (often in the form of huge snowfalls.)'"

This trend toward more storminess and wetter conditions helped set the stage for this week's flooding in and around Nebraska and the February floods in the lower Ohio Valley.

The year 2018 was among the wettest on record from the central Plains to the East Coast. Rivers were still running relatively high as the year closed because of this.

We had a terribly stormy winter, leading to the nation's wettest February on record. That helped set off the destructive floods in Tennessee last month. Then this bomb cyclone hit, bringing unseasonably heavy downpours of one to three inches northward from Kansas to South Dakota. All this rain, falling on dense snow cover created incredible amounts of runoff. The ground was largely frozen, so nothing sank in. All the water went into streams, rivers and neighborhoods.

This was an extreme, terribly destructive case of the much milder, much more benign spring flood scenarios that have long played out in late winter and spring in the Plains and elsewhere across the North.

With these new extremes apparently in play, once again, flood records are being set.

In Nebraska and Iowa, the benchmarks for worst Missouri River floods were 1993 and 2011, both relatively recent years. At Nebraska City, the Missouri River was expected to crest today at 30.2 feet, which is two feet higher than the previous record crest in 2011, says the Nebraska City News-Press.

At least 38 locations in five states in the middle of the nation has so far set new record flood crests in the past few days, reports The Weather Channel.

The United States is getting a temporary reprieve from the storminess and heavy rain from recent months. The next chance of any substantial, heavy rains won't come until at least March 25 or 26.  It's too soon to say how stormy it will get, more where and how or if much rain will fall in late March and April.

Across the North, including here in New England, we still have to be on alert. In general, storms are surprising us with their ferocity more than they did decades ago. Chances are high nothing really bad will happen around here later this spring. But you never know.

Back in Nebraska, John Pollack, a retired National Weather Service meteorologist told the Omaha World-Herald, "Disasters have become more likely to happen...Our risk is changing, the risk of flooding is getting worse."