Seems Like There's Flooding Everywhere This Winter

Evacuations as the Pearl River around Jackson, Mississippi continue
rising. Photo via the Jackson Clarion-Ledget

The climate change experts say that as the world warms, rainfall events will become more and more extreme in many parts of the world

That seems to be already happening.  It seems like there were lots and lots of floods around the world in the past couple of years. This year seems to be starting on an even worse footing.

You can't point and yell "Climate change!" at every odd or big time weather event, but this spate of flooding, various videos of which you will see below, are certainly consistent with climate change.

So let's wander around the flood zones.

The southeastern third of the United States has had repeated bouts of flooding since January.  Some places have had four times the normal amount of rain for this point in the year. Not surprisingly, the flooding has been intense.

The rain has temporarily let up in the South, but the flooding continues. In Jackson, Mississippi, the Pearl River is likely to reach its third highest level on record, flooding several neighborhoods and part of the downtown.

During the height of last week's floods, some of the worst of it was in hilly and mountainous parts of Kentucky and Tennessee.

Here's a mobile home being swept away in Harlan, Kentucky:



Australia spent the first half of the summer burning down. Then torrential rains hit. The good news is all that record breaking rainfall put out the fires. But now, many of the same areas that were hit by fires are now having serious flooding. Here's just one news dispatch from Australia this past week:


In Great Britain a week ago, a storm  dubbed Ciara caused widespread havoc, including the third destructive flood in West Yorkshire in eight years.  This was even before Storm Dennis caused even more havoc, which deserves its own post in this blog, which you will see coming in a day or two. (That story is still breaking as I write this Sunday morning).



That British flooding also did this to a riverside building:



It's not just coming from the rivers in Great Britain.  Watch this storm surge from Storm Ciara in New Brighton:



Now on to the Pacific Northwest.

Pendleton, Oregon, in the northeastern part of that state, is normally pretty dry. The Cascade Mountains well to the west block the flow of moisture off the Pacific Ocean, so they only get about 14 inches of rain per year. You don't associate Pendleton with heavy rain and flooding.

However, this year, the firehose of moisture off the Pacific is so extensive that Pendleton just experienced some  serious flooding:



Closer to the Pacific Coast, heavy rains over the past month have caused a lot of flooding. Winters are normally really wet west of the Cascades, but this year has been ridiculous.  However, rainfall in the West has been oddly variable.

San Francisco, California usually gets a fair share of rain in February.  This year, for only the second time on record, it doesn't look like it will rain in February at all. They want some of that rain a few hundred miles to the north, and Washington State would love to send some of their rain south.

It ain't happening.

Meanwhile, flooding along the Snohomish River stacked a massive logjam against a major highway bridge in Everett, Washington.  It was eventually cleared out, but only after a lot of effort. You can see why from this video: