An intense winter weather outbreak, informally dubbed Winter Storm Uri by the Weather Channel, swept across the U.S., bringing snow, sleet, freezing rain and frigid temperatures. Texas was hit especially hard, with all 254 counties under a winter storm warning at the same time.
Extreme weather spawned 18 tornadoes across five states Monday, USA Today reported. Tornadoes were reported in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Arizona, but were not as dangerous as forecasters had initially feared, the Associated Press reported. The National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center (SPC) had raised the probability of tornadoes in northwest Texas and central […]
Indonesia’s president elect announced plans this week to move the country’s capital away from Jakarta, reportedly the fastest sinking city in the world. A 2018 report said that Jakarta, located on the island of Java, was one of the global cities most vulnerable to sea level rise caused by climate change. It is sinking at […]
In terms of natural disasters, 2018 was a really bad year. Communities in the United States and around the world were devastated by record-breaking wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and other catastrophes. Lamentably, these weather and geophysical events caused 10,400 human deaths and $160 billion in estimated damages last year, reinsurance company Munich Re said on […]
By Lorraine Chow The summer of 2018 was intense: deadly wildfires, persistent drought, killer floods and record-breaking heat. Although scientists exercise great care before linking individual weather events to climate change, the rise in global temperatures caused by human activities has been found to increase the severity, likelihood and duration of such conditions. Globally, 2018 […]
By Tim Radford The probability that some city in the U.S. state of Texas will be hit again by Harvey-sized hurricanes, rainstorms that will dump half a meter of water in a short space of time, has increased sixfold in this century and will have increased 18-fold by 2100, thanks to climate change driven by […]
By Evelyn Milagros Rodriguez, University of Puerto Rico—Humacao I’ve always been fascinated by storms, particularly Puerto Rico‘s own history of them. I think it’s because I was born in September 1960 during Hurricane Donna. In its wake, that storm left more than 100 dead in Humacao, the city where I am now a special collections […]
Louisiana—which faces faster levels of sea-level rise than any other land on Earth—could lose as many as 2,800 square miles of its coast over the next 40 years and about 27,000 buildings will need to be flood-proofed, elevated or bought out, the New Orleans Advocate reported. https://twitter.com/EcoWatch/status/456559366557016065 These dire predictions were pulled from a new […]
As if worrying about whether or not the massive San Andreas Fault would erupt after a swarm of 200 earthquakes hit the nearby Salton Sea wasn’t enough for Californians, a new fault line was discovered this week in the same area. Researchers are calling it the Salton Trough Fault (STF). The fault, which lies along […]