Above, local weather man – “I’m a bit beside myself – I’ve never, ever, EVER, experienced or seen anything like this..”.
But completely unable to use the the phrase “climate change”.
Is that a station policy? or just stupidity?
When you look at the number of catastrophic floods we’ve seen in places like Vermont, and Upstate New York, now Connecticut – given the very vulnerable communities sited between hills in river valleys, things are looking pretty dire for the US Northeast.
Below, graph from US Global Change Research Program.
EPA Climate Change Indicators:
- In recent years, a larger percentage of precipitation has come in the form of intense single-day events. Nine of the top 10 years for extreme one-day precipitation events have occurred since 1995 (see Figure 1).
- The prevalence of extreme single-day precipitation events remained fairly steady between 1910 and the 1980s, but has risen substantially since then. Over the entire period from 1910 to 2023, the portion of the country experiencing extreme single-day precipitation events increased at a rate of about half a percentage point per decade (see Figure 1).
- The percentage of land area experiencing much greater than normal yearly precipitation totals increased between 1895 and 2023. There has been much year-to-year variability, however. In some years there were no abnormally wet areas, while a few others had abnormally high precipitation totals over 10 percent or more of the contiguous 48 states’ land area (see Figure 2). For example, 1941 was extremely wet in the West, while 1983 was very wet nationwide.3