extreme

26Aug

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE

Attribution Science Says Yes, Climate Change Is To Blame For Some Extreme Weather Events – Here’s How It Works

SCIENCE Xubin Zeng, University of Arizona Extreme rainfall and flooding left paths of destruction through communities around the world this summer. The latest was in Tennessee, where preliminary data shows a record-shattering 17 inches of rain fell in 24 hours, turning creeks into rivers that flooded hundreds of homes and killed at least 18 people. A lot of people are asking: Was it climate change? Answering that question isn’t so simple. There has always been extreme weather, but human-caused global warming can increase extreme weather’s frequency and severity. For example, research shows that human activities such as burning fossil fuels are unequivocally warming the planet, and we know from basic physics that warm air can hold more moisture. A decade ago, scientists weren’t able to...

How The Wildfire Season Got So Extreme – 2020 The Year The West Was Burning

More than 4 million acres of California went up in flames in 2020 – about 4% of the state’s land area and more than double its previous wildfire record. Five of the state’s six largest fires on record were burning this year. In Colorado, the Pine Gulch fire broke the record for that state’s largest wildfire, only to be surpassed by two larger blazes, the Cameron Peak and East Troublesome fires. Oregon saw one of the most destructive fire seasons in its recorded history, with more than 4,000 homes destroyed. What caused the 2020 fire season to become so extreme? Fires thrive on three elements: heat, dryness and wind. The 2020 season was dry, but the Western U.S. has seen worse droughts in the recent decade. It had several record-breaking heat waves, but the fires did not necessarily fol...

Extreme wildfires can create their own dangerous weather, including fire tornadoes – here’s how

It might sound like a bad movie, but extreme wildfires can create their own weather – including fire tornadoes. It happened in California as a heat wave helped to fuel hundreds of wildfires across the region, many of them sparked by lightning. One fiery funnel cloud on Aug. 15 was so powerful, the National Weather Service issued what’s believed to be its first fire tornado warning. So, what has to happen for a wildfire to get so extreme that it spins off tornadoes? As professors who study wildfires and weather, we can offer some insights. How extreme fire conditions form Fires have three basic elements: heat, fuel and oxygen. In a wildland fire, a heat source ignites the fire. Sometimes that ignition source is a car or power line or, as the West saw in mid-August, lightning strikes. Ox...