Deadly rivers in the sky

AccuWeather

AccuWeather Vice President of Forecast Operations Dan DePodwin and AccuWeather Climate Expert Brett Anderson discuss the top headlines related to climate change in the November 14 edition of Climate In The News.

Transcript

00:00It's all about extremes today on Climate in the News.

00:03We'll start with extreme rainfall and then cover extreme heat and its impacts on forests.

00:09Brad, our first study from the Washington Post, Deadly Rivers in the Sky,

00:13that focuses on the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.

00:16And when that water vapor turns to rain, we have significant problems.

00:20Yes, atmospheric rivers, we've been talking about that for a long time.

00:24We know what those are.

00:25Again, bring extreme amounts of rainfall or even snow, depending on the season.

00:30And we see a lot of that, especially in the west coast of the United States.

00:32But, of course, it occurs all over the world.

00:35We see these types of atmospheric rivers.

00:37The warming climate, what they found was, has caused the amount of water vapor

00:42moving through the Earth's atmosphere to increase 12% over the past 85 years.

00:47It doesn't sound like a lot, but it is.

00:49That seems like a good amount there, 12% over the last just under 100 years.

00:54This also links very well to what we know about climate change

00:58and how a warming world causes more water.

01:01Yes, it does.

01:02For every degree Celsius of warming, we're seeing the atmosphere able to hold 7% more water vapor.

01:09And also, although the increase has been 12% across the world,

01:14it seems that there are parts of the world that will be more impacted

01:17by higher amounts of water vapor in the future.

01:18Yeah, we're seeing places such as Atlantic Canada, Spain,

01:22which has had some real deadly floods, of course, Scandinavia,

01:26and much of the Arctic, parts of Southeast Asia as well.

01:29So that's obviously incumbent upon us to build better, have better engineering,

01:33to be less susceptible to these extreme rainfall events.

01:35We need to adapt.

01:36Absolutely adapt and try to prevent as much as we can or mitigate the impacts of these events in the future.

01:42Our second story today from Oregon State University.

01:46This study focused on extreme heat and how that has damaged forest canopies in the Pacific Northwest.

01:52This focuses on the heat dome of 2021.

01:55Yeah, massive heat dome.

01:56June 2021, we saw temperatures above 120 degrees in southern British Columbia,

02:03116 in Portland.

02:05So that extreme heat event, which lasted for a long period of time,

02:10caused leaves to suddenly turn from green to red to orange on many trees, also pine needles as well.

02:18And again, this made these trees much more susceptible to disease and insect damage.

02:23So it seems like this was sort of the first study of its kind to look at this change of forest canopies from heat,

02:29which may be more of a problem in the future.

02:31Absolutely.

02:32Again, these dying forests, again, much more susceptible to fire.

02:36Fire is becoming a big deal, especially large fires out across the western United States.

02:41So again, climate change increasing the frequency and severity of heat waves through the future.

02:46We're going to see more of this, unfortunately.

02:47It also may change the composition of forests over time as far as change because of these impacts from these heat domes that occur.

02:54Well, thank you, Brett, for that information.

02:55For other stories about climate, you can find that at accuweather.com slash climate.

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