As the Bay Area braces for another atmospheric river and the potential for flooding, San Diego is still recovering from last week’s historic rainfall.
A group of scientists in Paris have developed a tool called Climameter, to look at extreme weather events like San Diego’s flood and calculate the impacts of climate change.
Researchers at Climameter explain that a warmer earth is accelerating and amplifying the physics of the water cycle. The more humans heat the planet, the atmosphere gets thirstier, evaporating more water and often dumping that water more quickly, sometimes all on one place, like in Southern California, where Climameter was used to determine the likelihood of how burning fossil fuels made that atmospheric river even wetter, swamping neighborhoods and triggering mudslides.
Davide Farande from Climameter says, "For the San Diego area, we find that this increase of precipitation is … up to 15% more rain during this event due to anthropogenic climate change."
The calculations from Climameter use historical data and then provide context of extreme weather immediately after the actual event. It’s a tool we may be using more often, as what were once rare flood events are now happening several times a year.
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