Skip to content
Advertisement

Scientist suggests amazing 1-day climate swing of 10 degrees

Advertisement

Despite the thunderstorms and heavy downpours that blew through the Antelope Valley region this week, the searing heat is expected to expand across the Southwest through early next week which only tends to worsen conditions for drought-stricken California.

The dry and hot climate is expected to keep wildfire risks elevated; most of Southern California will not benefit from the moisture of Tropical Storm Linda circulating primarily over Baja California. Weather authorities reporting about the High Desert caution that even if you don’t see rain falling in the immediate area, thunderstorms in the distance can quickly fill typically dry creeks and river beds and transform these areas into a raging river with little or no warning.

The four-year drought has led one bioclimatologist to do an in-depth study about what percentage of the drought has been caused by human-induced climate change, and what percentage is due to natural climate variability. Patrick Williams, a California native, works at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and was the lead author of a recently published paper linking the drought to climate change. His findings tend to reinforce a wide-spread belief that man-made pollution is playing an increasingly significant role in global warming.

“We find that this drought, like any drought, is primarily caused by natural climate change,” Williams said. “But this drought is worse because of global warming. Warming causes the atmosphere’s ability to take water out of ecosystems to go up (evaporate). The last four years of drought in California can be blamed about 15 percent on human-induced global warming, and the other 85 percent is due to natural variability.”

Williams said that as the earth gets hotter, the atmosphere usually holds more water vapor, therefore there is more water available for rain. The heavy rain that fell over Palmdale and Acton this week, he said, is an indication there is plenty of water vapor in the atmosphere and when storms do appear, it will rain especially hard for a brief period of time causing flooding, damage to infrastructure and dangerous driving conditions.

The expected El Nino, he said, will temporarily tap into this accumulated water vapor and bring with it extra-heavy storms and flooding.

“The Southwest has just finished a 16-year dry period,” Williams said, “and soon it will become very wet. People will naturally believe that they don’t need to conserve as much water. We can expect an even more severe drought about 15 years from now, and if we don’t adhere to lessons learned from the past years [of drought], we’ll surely have a dire situation on our hands.”

Williams said future weather extremes are going to occur more frequently, such as a 10-degree increase in temperature not spanning period of years …but in one day.

“We need to plan for our worse-case scenarios,” he said. “These scenarios may only occur once in the next century, but in many cases that’s all it takes.”

Advertisement

Latest