Extreme Weather

About 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded when Hurricane Katrina's storm surge overwhelmed the city's levees.
Credit: Kelly Garbato/flickr

climatecentral.org - by Andrea Thompson - September 1, 2015

Black swans are catastrophic events that no one sees coming, while “grey swans,” as the are known, are extreme events for which there’s no historical precedent, but that could still potentially be predicted. A new study takes this concept into the realm of weather and climate, finding that global warming might sharply increase the odds of grey swan hurricanes and storm surge over the coming century.

While such tempests would still remain relatively rare, they could pose unrecognized but potentially serious threats to coastal areas like Tampa, Fla., and Dubai, with storm surge totals reaching into the double digits when measured in feet.

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CLICK HERE - STUDY - Grey swan tropical cyclones

By John Abraham | The Gaurdian | June 22, 2015

The paper finds that global warming is putting extreme weather on steroids 

One of the hottest areas of climate research these days is on the potential connections between human emissions, global warming, and extreme weather. Will global warming make extreme weather more common or less common? More severe or less severe? 

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The village of Dandagaun is hard to reach on a good day. The access road starts at the Bhote Koshi River, a Class V waterway that drains Himalayan glaciers, then heads more or less straight up for 5,000 feet, past tiny villages and mountain streams. After 10 long miles it curves into a bowl that opens to the northeast. Here sit terraced fields of rice and corn cut into the hillside. Technically speaking, the village, in Nepal’s Sindhupalchowk district, lies in the Himalayan foothills. But these are foothills in the way that the sun is a medium-size star. The ridgeline above the village rises sharply for a quarter mile. Looking at it requires straining your neck directly up.

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huffingtonpost.com - reuters - May 19, 2015

THALI, Nepal, May 19 (Reuters) - Nepali tea shop owner Phurba Sherpa has spent four nights cramped under a tarpaulin with his wife and nine others on a school field outside Kathmandu since falling rocks triggered by an earthquake last week demolished his distant mountain village.

The Nepali government is struggling to provide shelter for more than a million people like Sherpa who were uprooted by two massive earthquakes, first on April 25 and then 17 days later.

Tens of thousands are sleeping in the open, with monsoon rains possibly little more than a fortnight away.

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