Displaying items by tag: how is climate change affecting the south

Hurricane Debby made landfall near the town of Steinhatchee, Florida, at 7 a.m. Aug. 5, 2024, as a Category 1 storm. As it moved northeast, the storm stalled over the U.S. Southeast and delivered torrential rainfall. Some areas of South Carolina and Georgia recorded more than 20 inches of rain as the storm crawled northeast toward a second landfall (this time as a strong tropical storm) near Myrtle Beach, S.C.  NOAA

A warming climate means more water vapor, which means bigger and wetter tropical storms

(This story was originally published by The Conversation.)

Tropical Storm Debby was moving so slowly, Olympians could have outrun it as it moved across the Southeast in early August 2024. That gave its rainfall time to deluge cities and farms over large parts of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. More than a foot of rain had fallen in some areas by early Aug. 7, with more days of rain forecast there and into the Northeast.

Mathew Barlow, a climate scientist at UMass Lowell, explains how storms like Debby pick up so much moisture, what can cause them to slow or stall and what climate change has to do with it.

What causes hurricanes to stall?

Hurricanes are steered by the weather systems they interact with, including other storms moving across the U.S. and the Bermuda High over the Atlantic Ocean.

A hurricane may be moving slowly because there are no weather systems close enough to pull the hurricane along, or there might be a high-pressure system to the north of the hurricane that blocks its forward movement. In this case, a high-pressure system over the western U.S. was slowing Debby’s forward progress and the Bermuda High — which is a large, clockwise circulation of winds that generally runs up the East Coast — wasn’t close enough to be a factor.

That’s similar to what happened with the remnants of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, one of the best-known examples of a stalled hurricane. High pressure over the U.S. blocked its forward movement, allowing it to drop more than 50 inches of rain on parts of Texas.

Slower-moving storms have longer to rain over the same area, and that can dramatically increase the risk of flooding, as the Southeast is experiencing with Debby. 

Spreading avens are seen in bloom in the Appalachians. The endangered long-stemmed perennials survive in higher mountain elevations but their lack of space to move higher in elevation in times of climate change and warming further threaten the plant.  USFWS

It’s not just the coastlines that are recording climate change. Even the mountains of North Carolina are feeling the heat — including some endangered plants

“Atlanta reporter Dan Chapman retraced John Muir’s 1867 trek through the South, including the naturalist’s troubling legacy, to reveal environmental damage and loss that’s been largely overlooked.” This is an excerpt published by The Revelator from his book, A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir’s Journey Through an Endangered Land.

BOONE — It’s a wonder anything survives the ice, snow, and winds that pummel the ridge, let alone the delicate-seeming yellow flowers known as spreading avens.

The lovely, long-stemmed perennials are exceedingly rare, officially listed as endangered, and found only in the intemperate highlands of North Carolina and Tennessee. They sprout from shallow acidic soils underlying craggy rock faces and grassy heath balds. At times blasted with full sun, but mostly shrouded in mist, the avens are survivors, Ice Age throwbacks that refuse to die. Geum radiatum is only known to exist in fourteen places, including hard-to-find alpine redoubts reached via deer trail or brambly bushwhacking.