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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