Posts

Showing posts with the label flash droughts

Faster Than a Speeding Drought

Image
FLASH DROUGHTS Droughts Are Usually Slowly Developing Catastrophes Sort of Slo-Mo Trainwrecks So slow, they are hard to "see" if you are in the middle of a developing one. At least that's the case in a typical drought. "Typical" is getting harder to come by in these times of Climate Change (CC) with all the "thousand year" events happening anually and "hundred year" events happening monthly. Still, it's surprising how fast a destructive drought can develop these days. Meteorologists call them "Flash Droughts" (FD) That's a scary addition to the list of bad weather events. Here's how they work. Heat Domes (HD) are large areas of high pressure (HP) that capture and compress hot air and park over some part of the country and just sit there getting hotter and hotter and.  Usually HP areas move along from west to east in our hemisphere, but CC has made the jet stream (JS) weird. CC is causing instability in the JS so that it ...