Category: EXTREME_WEATHER_CN WASHINGTON_CN

An atmospheric river is bringing strong to damaging winds, heavy rain and below-normal temperatures for the Puget Sound region from Thursday evening through Saturday morning, the National Weather Service said.
Snow in the passes is expected as is potential river flooding, The Seattle Times reported.

Jeff Michalski, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Seattle, said to expect heavy rainfall across the region, including western Oregon, through Saturday evening, with the heaviest amounts over the Olympic and Cascade mountains.

A proposed series of sea barriers to protect New York’s harbor—which includes parts of New Jersey— from future storm surges? $52 billion.
Reducing risk of future damage to Rhode Island’s coast? More than $254 million.

Hawaii is looking at “an estimated $30 billion to relocate or elevate state roads and bridges, address impacts to airports, and protect the state’s commercial harbor facilities,” Edward Sniffen, Hawaii’s Department of Transportation (DOT) deputy director for highways, told Congress last year.

Florida’s Hurricane Ian, a $20 billion drought and heat wave in Europe, and deadly floods in Pakistan are among the catastrophes so far this year.

Scientists are once again sounding the alarm over the intensifying wildfires plaguing the American West. In a series of new peer-reviewed studies, researchers warned that the behemoth blazes of recent years have contributed to a surge in harmful air pollution and planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, and are even influencing extreme weather in other regions of the country.

The U.S. was hit with 15 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the first nine months of the year, according to scientists from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

The damage from Hurricane Ian will very likely run into the tens of billions of dollars and scientists say the United States can expect more severe storms like it as the planet heats up. They also say the risks of increasingly wild weather make it all the more urgent that cities and states take steps to protect people and property.

Hurricane Ian, now downgraded to a tropical storm, is expected to inflict as much as $40 billion in property damage claims and much higher total economic losses, RBC Capital Markets analysts calculated in an early assessment. Even though ferocious storms like Ian seem to make landfall with increasing regularity, insurers and environmentalists say that pricing the risk associated with these events will only get trickier.

Damien Gayle, reporter on climate activism

When activists from Extinction Rebellion towed a pink boat into Oxford Circus, in the heart of London’s busiest shopping area, and locked themselves to it, they changed the face of climate protest.

A near-perfect storm is set to bring hurricane-force winds and a massive storm surge into vulnerable communities in coastal Alaska.

Tropical Storm Fiona, which formed Wednesday evening several hundred miles east of the Lesser Antilles, is set to lash the Leeward Islands and Puerto Rico with heavy rain, rough surf, coastal rip currents and strong gusty winds. That’s just the first act in what looks to be a long-lived tour of the western Atlantic, with increasing signs that Fiona could become an eventual hurricane and may be one to watch for Bermuda or the U.S. East Coast.