"Flash Droughts" Becoming Common Under Climate Change ... - Wortfm

"Flash Droughts" Becoming Common Under Climate Change - WORT-FM 89.9

In August of 2018, the Madison area experienced the mother of all flash floods: a literally off-the-charts deluge of over 12 inches of rainfall within less than an hour. Get used to it, climatologists warned us: with climate change, such storms may become common over the next decades.

Now here we are, five years later, in the midst of what the U.S. Drought Monitor calls an “extreme drought.” Could our mercurial climate bring us not only more flash floods, but flash droughts as well? Jason Otkin, an associate scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies thinks so, and he joins us now by phone to tell us more.

Image by Luis Iranzo Navarro-Olivares from Pixabay
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