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Just as Southern cities are suddenly having to contend with snow, usually cool areas are seeing abnormal heat waves. And it’s not this is just a way station,” Barlow said.Īdapting to the constantly worsening weather is especially difficult, because areas are often being hit with uncharacteristically extreme events. “One aspect of that, that I’m not sure people always get, is that they look at the last six months or nine months and say, these extreme heat waves, even in Canada, the fire season, the flooding even in Central Park, and think, this is the new normal. The fact that “extreme weather” can refer to both a bad hurricane and an utterly devastating one might cause people to underestimate the increasing severity of these events. Johan Rockström, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, told the New York Times on Tuesday that recent weather events are increasingly “super-extremes.” “One of the issues with ‘extreme’ is that once you’ve used that word, it’s kind of hard to talk about what it looks like when you have bigger extremes,” Barlow told Yahoo News. In September, New York City was hit by Hurricane Ida, which brought a record rainfall of 8.41 inches, causing flooding in basements and streets, and killing 46 people in the metropolitan region.Ībandoned cars on the flooded Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx, N.Y., following heavy wind and rain from the remnants of Hurricane Ida, Sept. Last July was the hottest month on record, and 25 countries experienced their warmest year ever. The last seven years have been the seven hottest years in recorded history. Summer heat waves and heavy rainstorms are also getting more intense.

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Such unlikely locations as Texas are experiencing ice and snow with below-freezing temperatures, causing tens of thousands of residents to experience blackouts, just one year after a series of remarkably severe winter storms left millions in the state without power. On Thursday, more than 100 million Americans, from New England to the Rocky Mountains, find themselves under winter weather alerts. Last Saturday, the city of Boston tied its single-day snowfall record of 23.6 inches.

In January, multiple unusually strong winter snowstorms hit the South, one of which dropped 13 inches of snow in Boone, N.C., while another caused cars to get stuck for more than 24 hours on I-95 in Virginia after more than a foot of snow fell - far more than the few inches that had been predicted. “We see that in the observations, that’s predicted by theory and it’s confirmed by models.” “In terms of temperature and precipitation extremes, they’re definitely getting more extreme,” said Mathew Barlow, a professor of environmental earth and atmospheric sciences at UMass-Lowell. Dina Lewis rescues items from her home in Laplace, La., after it was destroyed by Hurricane Ida, Aug.

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