Washington DC Drowns In Epic Monday Flash Flood

The now famous phot of the person in the pink Oxford shirt
stranded atop a flooded ar in the Washington DC area
on Monday. 

I'm sure you heard on the news that Washington DC, and parts of Maryland and Virginia had quite a flash flood on Monday.

Lots of people got stranded in cars, and many of those had to be rescued the water came up so fast.

Rainfall rates were incredible. As WTOP explained:

"Reagan National Airport reported 3.3 inches of rain in an hour, including a half inch of rain in 11 minutes, on Monday morning. Between three and six inches of rain had fallen in Montgomery County by 11 a.m."

For perspective, 3.3 inches of rain is very roughly how much rain we should expect around here in Vermont during a full month.

WTOP goes on: "National Weather Service meteorologiset Cody Ledbetter said the storm dumped about 6.3 inches of rain near Frederick, Maryland, about 4.5 inches near Arlington, Virginia."

Driving into flooded roads is a big no-no. But many people got trapped because they set off for their morning commute before it started raining, then became trapped as the downpours hit and water started rising around their cars.

The National Weather Service declared a flash flood emergency, which is meant to (rightly) scare people into getting serious about taking precautions, like staying put and not driving if you were in a safe place that wasn't flooding.

It seemed no place was completely safe. Water even seeped into the White House basement.

As meteorologist Marshall Shepherd noted in Forbes, something called precipitable water was at sky high levels in the DC area Monday morning. It's complicated, but precipitable water is one way of measuring how hard it can potentially rain in a given area.

Precipitable water in the atmosphere was at near record highs at the time of the storms, so all you needed was a trigger to unleash incredible downpours. A weak trough of low pressure in the area did the trick.

You always have to be nervous when they say precipitable water levels are at the highest 1 percent possible. This often leads to flash floods.

Now, climate scientists will tell us that these big flash flood events like the one yesterday are becoming more common as global warming takes hold. Warmer air can hold more water, increasing the chances of flooding downpours.

All this is true. But I think it's impossible to say whether the flood in DC, Maryland and Virginia Monday has a direct line to climate change. Floods like these have always happened, so it could be just chance that this happened. Whether climate change influenced this is right now, anybody's guess.

Of course there's videos.

Here's a compilation of images and clips from NBC:



Here's a clip from the Washington Post. I especially like the sudden waterfalls in the Metro station and in somebody's back yard:



This is, or was, Baker Park in Frederick, Maryland:

Southeast Freeze Might Be $1 Billion Disaster. Hope You Won't Miss The Peaches

Destroyed, frost bitten peach blooms in South Carolina means
no peach crop this year. Photo by Cindy Kubovic/Aiken Standard

Farmers in the Southeast are reeling from last week's freeze that might have caused up to $1 billion in damage to crops.

We knew ahead of time there would be serious damage and that came to fruition, as there's not a heck of a lot you can do to stop the damage from a widespread freeze.

In South Carolina, 90 percent of the peach crop was wiped out, according to television station WISTV in Columbia, South Carolina.

State officials said they hoped to get federal aid to farmers, as some could face bankruptcy over this without help.

South Carolina is normally the second biggest peach producing state after California. The South Carolina crop is usually worth $90 million, says the Aiken (South Carolina) Standard. 

Wheat, strawberries, blueberries and corn in South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina and other states were also severely damaged, the Associated Press reportsd.

The freeze was at least as bad as an epic 2007 freeze that caused about $1 billion in crop losses, the AP says. 

This freeze was so damaging because a record warm February caused plants to grow and bloom prematurely across the Southeast.

Then, that nor'easter that dumped three feet of snow on us here in Vermont last week pumped lots of Arctic air into the Southeast, causing record low temperatures.

It got down to 25 degrees all the way down to Gainesville, Florida, which is the coldest on record there for so late in the season. 

Dead, frost-bitten cherry blossoms in Washington DC
this week. Photo by Kevin Ambrose via Washington Post

In Washington DC, the annual cherry blossom bloom is badly damaged.

Blossoms that had opened have turned brown because of the subfreezing temperatures, though many blossoms that had not yet opened probably survived and will bloom normally.

Perhaps half of Washington DC's cherry blossoms might not bloom, so the season is going to be subdued

Another blast of Arctic air is coming down from Canada this week, which could cause a little more damage to cherry blossoms in Washington.

Still, people in Washington are hoping any remaining buds might bloom and hide most of the dead, brown blossoms. Still, the whole thing is depressing. I haven't seen this cherry blossom frost destruction happen in Washington in my lifetime and few other people have, either.

However, unlike the freeze last week, the cold air will not punch down into the southeastern United States, so this won't cause any additional frost damage there.

In the Northeast, the cold will be deep and mid-wintry Wednesday and Thursday, but plants haven't come far enough along to have them get nipped by the freeze.

I'm pretty sure that everybody east of the Mississippi River is SO ready for spring, despite the super mild winter that just ended.

The Blizzard of 2016 Really IS One For The Record Books

Near record coastal flooding in Sea Isle,
New Jersey this morning.

UPDATE, 2:15 p.m. Saturday

Boy, given the dramatic forecasts ahead of what has turned out to be the Blizzard of 2016, I didn't think this storm would overperform, but it has.

It's still snowing hard in parts of Maryland. Many forecasters said snowfall accumulation would be up to three feet in the most extreme parts of the storm.

Already, Frederick, Maryland is up to three feet or so, and it's still snowing there. (Hi, John and Laura and the kids in Frederick! Sorry/Not Sorry I'm not there to dig you out!

Other areas are over 30 inches. Maybe some places will go over 40 inches by the time this is over.

One already had as of 3 p.m. A town in West Virginia measured 40 inches of new snow, but the storm is almost over there.

As meteorologists told us well in advance, the most dangerous and overlooked by the media feature of this storm would be the coastal flooding

Those forecasts sure were right. Record and near record coastal flooding was reported along the southern half of the Jersey Shore and in Delaware. Many homes and streets were under water this morning.

There was severe flooding in places like Cape May, and Barnegat, where mandatory evacuations were under way. People were rescued from flooded houses in Ocean City.

In southern New Jersey, the flooding was worse than in Superstorm Sandy in 2012, though Sandy's flooding was worse in northern New Jersey than further south anyway. 

Renewed flooding might cause added damage this evening along the East Coast.  

The biggest surprise of the storm was New York City. We knew the forecast for that region was problematic, because different computer models had widely varying estimates for how much the city would get. 



Bus crash amid the snow in Greenwich, Ct. this morning.

The National Weather Service in New York and area meteorologists played it smart. They predicted 6 to 12 inches for the New York metro area, but made it VERY clear in their forecasts that the potential was there for much more than that.

Sure enough, New York had 14 to 16 inches of new snow by 1 p.m. today, and heavy snow will continue the rest of the day. It now looks like 24 to 30 inches is likely in the Big Apple.

All flights at Newark JFK and LaGuardia are canceled through Sunday. Not surprisingly, a travel ban has been instituted in New York. today.

The heavy snow has expanded into far southern and eastern New England, but won't make it into central and northern New England..

It's also beginning to look like eastern Pennsylvania, and not Virginia and Maryland, might end up with the highest snow totals out of this storm. I'm guessing a few spots there might go over three feet of accumulation.

More updates to follow later today and/or tomorrow, so watch back here!


PREVIOUS DISCUSSION, from 7:30 a.m. Saturday morning

As I started writing this before dawn in northwestern Vermont this morning, the sky was clear.


Storm surge flooding in Lewes, Delaware

It was a seasonably cold, calm Saturday morning in January, about zero degrees, and I can see a beautiful full moon sunset over the Adirondacks out my office window. 

Quite a contrast compared to the Blizzard of 2016 smashing the Mid-Atlantic region.

The storm is still playing out as expected. Bands of incredibly heavy snow have pushed in off the Atlantic ocean through Virginia, the Washington DC area, and on into New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

So far, nine deaths have been blamed on the storm.

As dawn broke, Washington DC had already received more than a foot of snow. Just after 6 a.m, thundersnow rattled the Nation's Capital. 

Amounts ranged up to 18 inches in some areas of North Carolina, West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky.  And it was still snowing hard. I'm still expecting some reports of up to three feet of snow.

In Kentucky, thousands of motorists were trapped on a snow snarled Interstate 75 overnight. Many spent 10 hours or more in their cars.

It also seems the question of whether New York City would get blasted by heavy snow has been answered. It was snowing like hell there early this morning. Three inches of snow fell at LaGuardia airport in just an hour

The National Weather Service there has upped expected accumulation to 15 to 20 inches. Earlier forecasts indicated a foot or less. The storm has clearly nudged a bit further north than many had predicted.



Snow rapidly piling up on Washington DC streets early
Saturday morning via @salbal9 on Twitter

The storm is affecting points way to the south, too.  Light snow showers fell all the way south to Mobile, Alabama and the Florida panhandle. A little sleet fell in Lake City, Florida.

Tides are rising fast for the first high tide of the storm, expected around dawn today.

It will be the first of three storm surges that are sure to cause serious damage from Long Island to Virginia. Winds have already gusted as high as 85 mph on the Delmarva Penisula.

At coastal Lewes, Deleware, early this morning, winds were sustained at 59 mph, gusting to 72 mph, and there was a four-foot storm surge.

Later the tide at Lewes was up to nine feet, just under the record for the location, and still rising. The storm surge at Cape May, New Jersey was entering major flood stage by 7:30 a.m. this morning.

Many images on social media have popped up showing terrible shoreline flooding in New Jersey and Delaware.

Pretty scary! Lots of destruction.  And a sign of an awfully intense, big storm.

I'm going to take a hit from people who deride anybody who even hints global warming exists, and they will laugh at how anybody could suggest a raging blizzard could be a sign of climate change.

It's pretty much impossible to definitively blame this blizzard on global warming or say it influenced the storm. But it really is plausible global warming might have been one factor in this storm. Not the main factor, surely, but it might have given this nor'easter a boost.

An energized jet stream, linked to El Nino, and a powerful disturbance in the atmosphere the oversimplified and main reasons this storm happened.

But water temperatures just off the East Coast are warmer than normal. This nor'easter is feeding off that. Warmer water can supply more moisture to a storm than colder water, and this storm is taking full advantage of that fact.

The warm water is possibly warm in part because of global warming, so we have a wetter storm that can produce more precipitation.

You ask, but it's snowing! Snow isn't warm!

Well, yes, but global warming doesn't repeal winter. It obviously still gets cold in the winter obviously. Pretty much always will. If the warm moisture feeding off the Atlantic runs into that normal winter cold air, as it's doing now, you get these epic storms.

Again, I'll stress that a single event like a blizzard does not prove or disprove global warming. But it could well have been a factor in this mess. There would have been a big snowstorm with or without global warming, but perhaps the snow is a bit deeper because of it.

We'll argue more about that later, I'm sure. For now, we'll spend the day watching this truly epic storm.

Washington DC Is Sinking Into The Sea; Will Take Bad Politicos With It?

Burlington (Vermont) Free Press editor and writer Adam Silverman created a splash on the pages of USA Today this week by reporting on splashy research indicating Washington DC is sinking.

Well, we knew for ages that metaphorically, Washington is sinking, but now Silverman tells us that University of Vermont research say the sinking scenario is literal.

Washington DC is sinking, and the ocean is rising
Rut ruh, Jim Inhofe!!  

Or, as Silverman puts it, "......the results of a study that concludes the District of Columbia is sinking is a physical manifestation of the political environment in the nation''s capital."

The news has been picked up by all the major news outlets. Cue the late night comic jokes, too.

Here's the problem:

The U.S. Geological Survey and UVM research shows much of DC sits on land dredged up from the Potomac River. It's settling, and is expected to fall six inches or more during the next 100 years.

Meanwhile, sea levels are rising, possibly faster than first thought, due to climate change.

Money quote in the USA Today article:

"'It's ironic that the nation's capital, the place least responsive to the dangers of climate change, is sitting in one of the worst spots in could be,' said Paul Bierman a geologist at the University of Vermont in Burlingotn and senior author of the new paper about Washington's descent, said in a statement. 'Will the Congress just sit there with their feet getting ever wetter?'"

Probably not, the way things are going. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-OK, will probably just grab another snowball to "prove" to the world that Washington is not in climate and elevation trouble.

I'll just let Silverman do a little more reporting here, as seen in USA Today:

"'This falling land will exacerbate the flooding that the nation's capital faces from rising ocean waters due to a warming climate and melting ice sheets  - accelerating the threat to the region's monuments, roads, wildlife refuges and military installations,' University of Vermont researchers said in releasing the findings Tuesday."

We've heard about Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Will Congress, under the powerful intoxicant of the fossil fuel lobby, throw snowballs while Washington DC sinks?