Graphics present how the 2 climate extremes will extra typically pair up
Climate change tends to deliver out the worst within the climate, be it excessive chilly or warmth, rain or hearth. A brand new examine discovered that the warming environment will increase the chance {that a} wildfire within the Western U.S. can be adopted by intense rainfall. This confluence of occasions raises the chance of landslides and flash floods.
“Once you’ve had a wildfire burn through, you kill off all the vegetation, and you don’t have any root structures there holding the soil in place, so it’s a lot more vulnerable,” says University of California, Santa Barbara, local weather scientist Samantha Stevenson, who was a co-author on the examine.
The fires aren’t inflicting the storms, however the identical rising temperatures that lead fires to turn into extra extreme enable the environment to hold extra moisture, inflicting rain occasions to dump extra water rapidly. “We’re talking about superstrong rainstorms, the 99.9th percentile,” Stevenson says.
This article was initially printed with the title “Wild Weather” in Scientific American 327, 1, 80 (July 2022)
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0722-80
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