Category: Downpours_MN KENTUCKY_CN

The death toll from severe flooding in eastern Kentucky has risen to 28 people, including several children, and the governor said more fatalities are expected as search-and-rescue teams go door-to-door in the Appalachian foothills to assess the damage.

Search and rescue operations continued on Sunday in eastern Kentucky, where devastating floods, the product of extreme rainfall, swept through rural communities last week.

Deadly floods are slamming the US Heartland. More than 2,000 miles away, dangerous heat is scorching the Pacific Northwest. The same phenomenon is to blame for both.
A massive bend in the jet stream — narrow bands of high winds encircling the Earth — is causing the havoc. In the Northwest, the jet steam has curved far north, allowing hot air to surge into Oregon and Washington. In the Midwest and Appalachia, it’s dipped south, bringing cool from Canada that’s colliding with with tropical air from the Gulf of Mexico, triggering ruinous downpours in Missouri

As climate change warms the planet, drives up sea levels and energizes hurricanes, the arsenal of dangerous impacts delivered by the fierce storms is expected to get supercharged.
Among the most worrisome: powerful flooding from storm surge.
Rising seas and stronger winds mean the punishing waves pushed ashore by tropical storms and hurricanes will make their way farther and farther inland. That inland march would expose a larger swath of the U.S. coast to the kind of flooding unleashed during Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and put more people at risk of drowning, the leading cause of death in hurricanes.

A record-breaking storm that swept through California in recent days was made worse by climate change, experts say. And not just because of additional rainfall that’s a symptom of a warmer climate. Adding to the misery was what preceded the deluge: months of dry conditions and devastating wildfires.

The drought-dried shores of Folsom Lake were damp this week after what officials called the first big storm of the season.

The water level at Lake Oroville, which receded so much this summer that officials had to close its hydroelectric power plant for the first time, rose by more than 16 feet. And the Russian River — recently reduced to something more like a trickle — flowed with more ease after the atmospheric river dumped record-breaking amounts of rain across California, replenishing dwindled reservoirs and rehydrating cracked terrain.

Bomb cyclone. Rivers of rain. Emergency response officials were bracing all of last week for the worst days of the storm — and it finally arrived late Saturday evening. Light scattered showers in Northern California, already burned out by a summer of fire, morphed into an increasingly heavy downpour overnight.

A quarter of the roads in the United States would be impassable during a flood, according to a new study by First Street Foundation that looks at flooding threats to the country’s critical infrastructure.

The floods that killed at least 20 people in Tennessee last weekend arrived with shocking speed and force — seemingly a case study of the difficulties of protecting people from explosive rainstorms as climate change gets worse.