‘Unprecedented’ US flood season will imperil 200m people, experts warn

The severe flooding in the American midwest is set to only be a prelude to “unprecedented” levels of flooding across the US in the coming months that will imperil 200 million people, federal government scientists have warned.

A team enters a flooded house to pull out several cats
 during flooding of the Missouri river near Glenwood,
Iowa, on 18 March. 

Nearly two-thirds of the lower 48 states will have a heightened risk of flooding until May, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) forecast.

Communities living near the Mississippi river, which has received rain and snow levels up to 200% above normal, the lower Ohio river basin, the Tennessee river basin and the Great Lakes are at the greatest risk, Noaa said on Thursday. Vast swaths of the rest of the country may also get mild or moderate flooding, including most of eastern US and parts of California and Nevada.

Read the story from The Guardian by Oliver Milman - “‘Unprecedented’ US flood season will imperil 200m people, experts warn.”

Extreme Weather Flooding the Midwest Looks a Lot Like Climate Change

Devastating storms still roiling much of the American Midwest have dumped record levels of rain over the past week and caused flash flooding that has killed at least 10 people, inundated towns and highways, and forced hundreds of people to evacuate their homes. Parts of Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Arkansas and Louisiana received 10 to 15 inches of rain in the past seven days, according to the National Weather Service, resulting in record crests of numerous rivers across the central United States.

A flooded neighborhood in Arnold, Missouri on May 4, 2017.
 Heavy downpours from slow-moving storms over the
 past week sent rivers over their banks, flooding towns and
shutting down roads and highways in several states.

Extreme storms like these have become more common as global temperatures have risen and the oceans have warmed. Some have the clear fingerprints of man-made climate change.

"Of course there is a climate change connection, because the oceans and sea surface temperatures are higher now because of climate change, and in general that adds 5 to 10 percent to the precipitation," Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said. "There have been many so-called 500-year floods along the Mississippi about every five to 10 years since 1993." 

   

Read the Inside Climate News story - “Extreme Weather Flooding the Midwest Looks a Lot Like Climate Change.”

Crictical crops suffer as droughts worsen and heat increases

For all the wrong reasons, the summer of 2012 was a historic one for the American Midwest. Plagued by the worst drought the region had seen in decades, as well as weeks of high temperatures, one of the country’s most productive agricultural regions faced massive shortages in its annual corn crop, driving corn prices to a record high.

A new study, published Wednesday in Nature, argues that the American Midwest isn’t the only place to see staple crops like corn suffer in the face of extreme weather events. The paper, written by a team of geographers from the University of British Columbia, analyzed the effects that extreme temperatures, floods, and droughts have had on the last five decades of crop harvests. What they found was that both droughts and heat waves had a marked impact on a country’s crop production, cutting into cereal crops like wheat, rice, and maize by 10 percent and 9 percent respectively. Floods and cold spells, the study found, had no impact on crop production.

Read the ClimateProgress story - “Heat Waves And Drought Are Already Having A Devastating Impact On Important Crops.”