A dummy is photographed after being swept away by floods in Valencia, Spain, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024. Credit: AP/Alberto Saiz
“It’s incredible,” he said.
Even without the potential changes to the jet stream, several scientists said they are sure that basic physics are making storms like this wetter.
It’s a core equation in physics called the Clausius-Clapeyron relation. It says for every degree Celsius the air warms, it can hold 7% more moisture (4% more for every degree Fahrenheit). The world has warmed 1.3 degrees Celsius because of greenhouse gases, so it’s about 9% to 10% heavier rain, at the least, said Imperial College climate scientist Friederike Otto. She helps run World Weather Attribution that checks for human fingerprints in extreme weather, sometimes finding them, sometimes not.
“It is very clear that climate change did play a role,” especially in short bursts like what happened in Valencia, Otto said.
That air holding more moisture may be “just for starters,” meteorologist Masters said. When the moisture condenses it releases heat energy, which goes into the storm, invigorates it, increases its updrafts and allows it to pull even more moisture from a larger area, which could boost rainfall as much as 20%, he said.
“It just kind of feeds and you get a vicious cycle,” he said.
Fischer found a similar storm in the same place in 1957. But this year’s storm, with warmer air stoking it, was much wetter. The 1957 storm dumped around 250 millimeters of rain (10 inches), but this week’s had reports of more than 490 millimeters (19 inches) in just eight hours, Fischer said. There could be rain gauge issues involved, but part of this is the atmosphere holding and dumping more water.
And then you add a toasty Mediterranean sea.
It had its warmest surface temperature on record in mid-August, with a mean temperature of 28.47 Celsius, said Carola Koenig of the Centre for Flood Risk and Resilience at Brunel University of London.
“This facilitates a greater uptake of moisture in the air, resulting in more rain when the atmosphere starts to cool in the autumn,” she said. “As things stand, Spain needs to embrace itself for continued heavy rain for the next few days.”
There may be different ways of counting and attributing climate change and the havoc it wreaks, Otto said, but one thing is for certain: “Burning fossil fuels causes climate change and climate change causes death and destruction.”
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Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment
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Publish date : 2024-10-30 14:33:00
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