Weather - US

Emergency workers among damaged vehicles in a open parking area of northern Athens after a flash flood struck the Greek capital. Photograph: Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images

Exclusive: Prof Michael Mann declares the impacts of global warming are now ‘playing out in real-time’

theguardian.com - by Damian Carrington - July 27, 2018

The extreme heatwaves and wildfires wreaking havoc around the globe are “the face of climate change,” one of the world’s leading climate scientists has declared, with the impacts of global warming now “playing out in real time.”

Climate change has long been predicted to increase extreme weather incidents, and scientists are now confident these predictions are coming true.  Scientists say the global warming has contributed to the scorching temperatures that have baked the UK and northern Europe for weeks.

The hot spell was made more than twice as likely by climate change, a new analysis found, demonstrating an “unambiguous” link.

Hurricane Harvey over the Gulf of Mexico in August 2017. The storm stalled over Texas and dropped nearly 50 inches of rain in some places.  Credit NOAA/NASA GOES Project

CLICK HERE - STUDY - A global slowdown of tropical-cyclone translation speed

A new study shows that storms are staying in one place longer, much like Hurricane Harvey did last year.

nytimes.com - by Kendra Pierre-Louis - June 6, 2018

 . . . A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature focuses on what is known as translation speed, which measures how quickly a storm is moving over an area, say, from Miami to the Florida Panhandle. Between 1949 and 2016, tropical cyclone translation speeds declined 10 percent worldwide, the study says. The storms, in effect, are sticking around places for a longer period of time.

(CLICK HERE - READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

An image of Hurricane Harvey taken by the GOES-16 satellite as the storm collided with the Texas coast. (Image courtesy NASA.)

Ocean evaporation matched up with massive overland rainfall, new analysis finds

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Hurricane Harvey Links to Ocean Heat Content and Climate Change Adaptation

ucar.edu - May 10, 2018

In the weeks before Hurricane Harvey tore across the Gulf of Mexico and plowed into the Texas coast in August 2017, the Gulf's waters were warmer than any time on record, according to a new analysis led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

These hotter-than-normal conditions supercharged the storm, fueling it with vast stores of moisture, the authors found. When it stalled near the Houston area, the resulting rains broke precipitation records and caused devastating flooding.

"We show, for the first time, that the volume of rain over land corresponds to the amount of water evaporated from the unusually warm ocean," said lead author Kevin Trenberth, an NCAR senior scientist. "As climate change continues to heat the oceans, we can expect more supercharged storms like Harvey."

CLICK HERE - NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER TROPICAL CYCLONE REPORT - HURRICANE IRMA (AL112017)  30 August–12 September 2017 - John P. Cangialosi, Andrew S. Latto, and Robbie Berg National Hurricane Center - 9 March 2018 - (111 page .PDF report)

nhc.noaa.gov

Irma was a long-lived Cape Verde hurricane that reached category 5 intensity on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. The catastrophic hurricane made seven landfalls, four of which occurred as a category 5 hurricane across the northern Caribbean Islands. Irma made landfall as a category 4 hurricane in the Florida Keys and struck southwestern Florida at category 3 intensity. Irma caused widespread devastation across the affected areas and was one of the strongest and costliest hurricanes on record in the Atlantic basin.

ALSO SEE ADDITIONAL REPORTS HERE - National Hurricane Center - 2017 Atlantic Hurricane Season