Cliff Mass: Substantial atmospheric river expected next week
The Associated Press cited a study in its coverage of the Washington flooding that linked climate change to intense rainfall.
Cliff Mass, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, told “The Jason Rantz Show” on Seattle Red that while climate change could have played a small part, major flooding would have happened regardless.
“Climate change played a very small role here, and it could have contributed slightly. For every one degree centigrade warming, the atmosphere gets about 7% more water. Well, we’ve warmed up during the last 100 years about 2 degrees centigrade or 1.4 degrees centigrade. So it’s certainly possible that there was 10% more water vapor in the atmosphere. So maybe this thing was juiced up slightly by climate change, but we would have had a major event even without it,” he explained.
Mass emphasized that the atmospheric river should not be attributed to climate change.
“One should not pin this on climate change,” he said. “This has to do with weather features coming together in an optimal way to give us the moisture stream and the uplift on the mountains.”
Rain to pick back up next week with ‘substantial’ atmospheric river
Looking at the forecast, Mass noted rain will ease tomorrow, but overnight remains the biggest risk as flooding peaks.
“The rain event is over,” he said. “The problem is it takes time for the water to run down the slopes and get into the rivers.”
However, rain will pick back up around Tuesday or Wednesday next week as a weaker atmospheric river moves in, about 70% of the previous storm’s intensity.
“This is going to be a substantial river, but it’ll be about 70% of what this one was,” Mass said.
He added that while it will be weaker than the previous storm, the danger lies in rain falling on already saturated soils.
“It doesn’t look quite as significant as this one, down maybe 30% but a pretty strong event is going to happen in the middle of next week, and on top of already saturated soils and high river levels, there’s danger in that one too. So we’re gonna have to watch that very carefully,” Mass said.
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