The weather records for the New York City metropolitan area fell almost as quickly as the rain on Wednesday night. The National Weather Service issued its first flash flood emergency ever for the city, and in Central Park, 3.2 inches of rain fell in an hour, setting a record. Newark, New Jersey, matched it, also getting 3.2 inches of rain in an hour. Wednesday became the wettest day on record in Newark, with total rainfall of 8.4 inches. New York City’s 7.1 inches of rain was its fifth wettest day. Both cities experienced a 1-in-500-year rainfall event. The result was one of the deadliest and most destructive flash flood events to hit the tri-state, with at least 29 people dead as of Thursday afternoon. It was a storm that was forecast days in advance, with the New York office of the National Weather Service issuing a flash flood watch as early as Monday. But the intense rainfall still seemed to catch many off guard, underscoring just how difficult it can be to predict the most dangerous aspects of climate change-fueled storms.“It wasn’t that it was 6 inches in a day, but most of that fell in a couple of hours,” said Bob Henson, a meteorologist and writer for Yale Climate Connections, an online news service. “That was what really drove the flash aspect of the flooding and what caused the really rapid water rise.”Even when forecasts predict extreme rainfall, it can be hard for people to grasp just how much water can fall in a short amount of time.“It can be difficult to visualize what it means when we say life-threatening flash floods,” Henson said. “Some folks hear, ‘This is the remnants of a hurricane” and think: It’s no big deal. It’s just the leftovers.”That dangerous disconnect may become even more problematic as climate change supercharges storms and hurricanes. While the frequency of storms is not expected to increase in a warming world, research has shown that climate change is intensifying storms when they do occur — and that can often manifest itself in a deluge of rain. Nine of the top 10 years for extreme one-day precipitation events have all occurred since 1996, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s heavy precipitation tracker. Climate change is making storms wetter because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. Scientists have estimated that for every 1 degree Celsius of temperature rise, the atmosphere can hold 7 percent more evaporated moisture. The Northeast is especially susceptible, being the region with the greatest increase in heavy rain events since the 1970s. As such, global warming is amplifying the risk of flooding. Storms such as Hurricane Harvey, which dropped up to 60 inches of rain over parts of Texas in 2017, and Ida, when it made landfall in Louisiana Sunday as a hurricane and as it subsequently moved up into the Northeast, show how dire the consequences can be — particularly in cities.
All data is taken from the source: http://nbcnews.com
Article Link: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/climate-change-fuels-hard-predict-storms-hit-new-york-city-area-rcna1878
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