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NickB79

(19,246 posts)
Tue Jan 10, 2023, 05:15 PM Jan 2023

A few years ago a study predicted a megaflood in California

https://www.wired.com/story/the-biblical-flood-that-will-drown-california/

We know that before human civilization began spewing millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere annually, California was due “one megaflood every 100 to 200 years”—and the last one hit more than a century and a half ago. What happens to this outlook when you heat up the atmosphere by 1 degree Celsius—and are on track to hit at least another half-degree Celsius increase by midcentury?

That was the question posed by Daniel Swain and a team of researchers at UCLA’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences in a series of studies, the first of which was published in 2018. They took California’s long pattern of droughts and floods and mapped it onto the climate models based on data specific to the region, looking out to century’s end.

What they found isn’t comforting. As the tropical Pacific Ocean and the atmosphere just above it warm, more seawater evaporates, feeding ever bigger atmospheric rivers gushing toward the California coast. As a result, the potential for storms on the scale of the ones that triggered the Great Flood has increased “more than threefold,” they found. So an event expected to happen on average every 200 years will now happen every 65 or so. It is “more likely than not we will see one by 2060,” and it could plausibly happen again before century’s end, they concluded.


If you want more info, look for articles about the ARKStorm study. The Great Flood they reference is the Great Flood of 1862, which created an inland sea hundreds of miles long.

If you think what's hitting California is bad now, our kids and grandkids will likely see far, far worse.
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