4 ms·

can someone summarize?

• AareyBaba 4y ago
  Major floods in the Sacramento Valley take place every 100 to 200 years according to sediment cores. Based on this evidence, scientists predict that the next major flood event in California is due in the next 40 years. Los Angeles streets will be under water, tornados will destroy Santa Monica pier and there are sharks everywhere.
  • nomel 4y ago
    If the climate has changed, I assume the ability to predict future events, using past ones, isn’t so great anymore?
    • iancmceachern 4y ago
      I think the general thought is that they will be similar events, just more severe. It's not as if we've entered into a parallel universe, just the same one with more extremes on the low and high end of things.
• umeshunni 4y ago
  Summary of the paper: Despite the recent prevalence of severe drought, California faces a broadly underappreciated risk of severe floods. Here, we investigate the physical characteristics of “plausible worst case scenario” extreme storm sequences capable of giving rise to “megaflood” conditions using a combination of climate model data and high-resolution weather modeling. Using the data from the Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble, we find that climate change has already doubled the likelihood of an event capable of producing catastrophic flooding, but larger future increases are likely due to continued warming. We further find that runoff in the future extreme storm scenario is 200 to 400% greater than historical values in the Sierra Nevada because of increased precipitation rates and decreased snow fraction. These findings have direct implications for flood and emergency management, as well as broader implications for hazard mitigation and climate adaptation activities.