Tuesday, July 09, 2019

Rainfall intensification noted

There's been a lot of flash flooding in Washington DC area:
Reagan National Airport, an official observing site, saw 2.79 inches of rain in just one hour, beating a 1945 record of 2.05 inches, The Washington Post reported.
That's climate change for you, after 1 degree globally.

Let's throw the dice and see what its like under 2 degrees, hey my stoopid reader JC?

Update:   for anyone who wants to argue about attribution to climate change, as I have recently said in comments, intensification of rainfall is being widely studied and the connection with climate change is clear - it was predicted to increase and it is increasing.  If a place breaks a previous rainfall intensity record by a very high margin, then I don't think there is much to argue about in terms of attribution.  Have a look at this, for example:
Extreme precipitation has been proposed to scale with the water vapor content in the atmosphere. The Clausius‐Clapeyron (CC) relation describes the rate of change of saturated water vapor pressure with temperature as approximately 7% °C−1 and sets a scale for change in precipitation extremes in the absence of large changes to circulation patterns [Trenberth et al., 2003; Pall et al., 2007]. Analysis of observed annual maximum daily precipitation over land areas with sufficient data samples indicates an increase with global mean temperature of about 6%–8% °C−1 [Westra et al., 2013]. However, observational relations between precipitation extremes and temperature (or dew point temperature) show that subdaily precipitation extremes may intensify more than is anticipated based upon currently available modeling and theory [e.g., Lenderink and van Meijgaard, 2008; Hardwick‐Jones et al., 2010]. This seems to be a property of convective precipitation and may be explained by the latent heat released within storms invigorating vertical motion. This mechanism is thought to generate greater increases in hourly rainfall intensities [Lenderink and van Meijgaard, 2008; Berg et al., 2009; Hardwick‐Jones et al., 2010; Westra et al., 2014; Blenkinsop et al., 2015; Lepore et al., 2015], with a stronger response in convective systems than in stratiform systems [Berg et al., 2013]. This suggests that hourly extremes will probably intensify more with global warming than daily extremes [e.g., Utsumi et al., 2011; Westra et al., 2014].

6 comments:

GMB said...

No you are talking bullshit and getting your information from proven liars. Flash flooding is to do with the texture of the land and soil quality.

If you have high quality soil it will soak up the water. If you have high quality soil, trees, ponds, swales, dams and terraces you will neither face flooding or droughts. You are distracting from real solutions by running with known liars.

The cosmic rays are at their highest and the atmospheric water vapour is not tapped out. So we can expect heavy rains now and droughts later. Anyone who says that CO2 release can affect these basic physics relationships is a liar.

GMB said...

I was talking to Cambria on the phone about this stuff a dozen years ago. It’s all come to pass like clockwork but has only now become extremely clear. The solar wind has been feeble long enough for the cosmic ray levels to soar. So it’s unprecedented rain followed be horrific cold and drought.

GMB said...

Every inch of the data is being faked. Just for example the liars have been trying to overstate sea level rise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1PS9-oOfRw

Jason Soon said...

These ppl are literally nuts https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/07/weight-of-the-world-climate-change-scientist-grief/

Steve said...

Hmmm. Of the scientists quoted as suffering mental distress, I have only heard of one via twitter, and he's an odd character in other respects (I think, from his own tweets, a father of a couple of boys from a failed relationship who is both queer and on the aspie spectrum. He gets uptight about a lot of things, it seems to me.)

The "big names" of climate science don't talk of the mental anguish. Michael Mann, in particular, seems particularly resilient given the amount of attack he personally has come under. He did win one of his legal cases recently - as far as I know, the Mark Steyn one is still in some sort of limbo.

On the other hand, as someone on Twitter has said, if an engineer was convinced, after years of careful work, that their studies showed a car or building was unsafe and going to cause deaths, and a large bunch of politicians refused to believe it or do anything, people probably would not think their stress reaction all that unusual.

It's rich that Judith Curry has written a commentary saying that they need to calm down and not be so pessimistic when her own "work" is devoted to telling Republican politicians to ignore the scientists she says are now being too sensitive. She is at the core of their anguish.

GMB said...

Of course Michael Mann isn't suffering. He's on his natural mission as a Jew. The maintenance of public myths, getting gentiles fighting each-other and applying political pressure against real scientists. He's not a scientist himself by any stretch of the imagination. He's just a Jew.