00:00From drought to deluge to wildfires, we'll cover all that on Climate in the News.
00:05Our first article from the World Meteorological Organization, Brett,
00:09a study of the water cycle and how that's become more erratic
00:13over the last many decades as part of climate change.
00:16Yes, and extreme as well.
00:19We're seeing more cases, Dan, of deluge, meaning heavy rainfall, extreme events,
00:24going right to drought and then back to deluge,
00:27which is possibly the worst possible thing you could have in terms of agriculture.
00:31Yeah, and the extremes, they're also seen in the river basins around the world.
00:35The report outlines how only a third of those river basins are near normal,
00:39which means that two-thirds are either well below or well above.
00:42That out-of-balance state is not good.
00:44The extreme nature of rainfall, though, Brett, is something that we've studied here at AccuWeather recently
00:48with an exclusive study.
00:49Talk about how that really proves this point.
00:51Yeah, we looked at the United States database, our own database, covering 44 regions,
00:57and what we found was, Dan, daily four-inch rainfall events have increased about 70% since the mid-1960s,
01:06and the number of hours per year of one-inch or greater rainfall has nearly tripled since 1985.
01:12We talk a lot about liquid water here.
01:13Obviously, frozen water in glaciers is another area significantly being impacted by climate change.
01:18Yeah, glacier loss, certainly, this is the third straight year of significant glacier loss
01:23across all regions of the world, and again, those trends are expected to continue.
01:27The iraic nature of the water cycle impacts the water quality and also the access to water.
01:33The study also importantly noted that over 3 billion people have inadequate water access at least one month per year.
01:40That's right, and that could increase to 5 billion by 2050.
01:43So significant risk there from a water access and water quality perspective.
01:48Our second story today is from UPI, a study about wildfires in the western U.S.,
01:54and we talk a lot about the smoke impact spread from those wildfires,
01:56but this really looked at ozone, and talk a bit about how ozone is created and why it matters in this case.
02:01Yeah, ozone is created from fires at least, from the smoke contains chemical compounds
02:06that react with sunlight to cause ozone.
02:09Now, when we think of ozone, we think, oh, we've got to preserve the ozone layer, which is true.
02:12So that's talking about the stratospheric ozone high up in the atmosphere.
02:17What we're talking about here is tropospheric ozone, which is at the lower levels closer to where we live,
02:23and you don't want to increase that.
02:25That traps heat in addition to causes poor air quality.
02:28So with trapping heat, poor air quality, definitely something that's not good from a health perspective,
02:33and it seems like the ozone has increased in terms of the study period they looked at, which was in August of 2020.
02:38That's right. Yeah, it's increased about 21 parts per billion with these fires going on here, which is very poor.
02:46And that's poor, and that increase also puts the average ozone in certain situations above the EPA standard health safety limit,
02:53which obviously is a concern too for health.
02:54Yeah, and again, we're seeing, again, many conditions, lung, heart conditions, and premature death from the increase in ozone.
03:01Yeah, so widespread impacts of wildfires, not just from the smoke, but the chemical compounds that the smoke produces, and then in this case, ozone.
03:08Well, thanks, Brett.
03:08For other stories about climate and other information, you can find that at accuweather.com slash climate.
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