Central New York has seen its fair share of extreme weather this week. Communities are recovering from heavy rainfall, flooding and tornadoes, but is this just the start of a new kind of climate?
Heavy rains this week lead to serious flooding in parts of central New York and Onondaga County. According to Liz Carter, an assistant professor at the civil and environmental engineering department at Syracuse University, the record heat across the globe is likely the cause.
“Warmer air temperatures will lead to more frequent precipitation events, they are going to happen more often,” Carter said. “And more intense precipitation events. The water is going to fall down from the sky more quickly than it used to.”
Steve Shaw, a faculty member at SUNY ESF’s department of environmental resources engineering, agreed. He said there is data that shows how much more rain we can expect to see as temperatures are on the rise.
“For every one degree Celsius increase in temperature, average temperature, you will have a 7% increase in rainfall intensity,” Shaw said. “That’s pretty consistent with what we are seeing.”
Measurements from the National Weather Service show that more than five inches of rain fell in Brewerton. Liverpool picked up more than seven inches. Shaw said normally residents would not think they would see levels like that.
“You would not expect to see that more than every 25 years,” Shaw said.
Carter said regular expectations for weather events may have to adjust in the new climate.
“Expecting the unexpected is a reasonable plan moving forward,” Carter said.
Carter said so long as we see increasing temperatures, the risk for heavier rainfall and flooding will increase too.
“It is safe to say that we can expect to be seeing more frequent, more intense precipitation in this area that will be associated with an increased risk of flooding,” Carter said.
Pluvial flooding, or flooding that occurs with no bodies of water close by, can increase because of heavy rainfall. Carter said more moisture in the air and increased precipitation can lead rapidly to flooding like this.
“The ground can soak up water at a set rate,” Carter said. “If the water is falling out of the sky more quickly as precipitation, more of it is going to run off the surface than would have in the past because it doesn't have as much time to infiltrate down into that soil and that groundwater for us.”
Despite this, Shaw said it is important to remember that although the heavy rain and flooding events may be more intense, they are not something that has never happened before.
“I think when people see these events happen, they sort of forget that ‘ok, this has happened in the past,’” Shaw said. “But, especially when we go back and analyze data, they are becoming more intense over time.”
