Climate change is making severe storms both more common and more intense.
First the river rose in Texas. Then, the rains fell hard over North Carolina, New Mexico and Illinois.
In less than a week, there were at least four 1-in-1,000-year rainfall events across the United States — intense deluges that are thought to have roughly a 0.1% chance of happening in any given year.
“Any one of these intense rainfall events has a low chance of occurring in a given year,” said Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at the nonprofit organization Climate Central, “so to see events that are historic and record-breaking in multiple parts of the country over the course of one week is even more alarming.”
It’s the kind of statistic, several experts said, that is both eye-opening and likely to become more common because of climate change.
If 4 of them happened in a week, they are not once in a thousand years, lol, they are weekly occurrences
Believe it or not, there’s actual science and statistics that go into what is considered a “100 year storm” or “1000 year storm”, and yes they will be adjusted. That’s how it’s meant to work.
Question is, if it is a 1:1000 year event locally, state level, country wide?
These terms are often thrown around rather broadly by media, which does not help their use and makes it easy for cliamte change deniers to attack it.
These terms also provide a false sense of security. For instance we had a “thousand year” flood in parts of Germany in 2021 that killed about 200 people. The statisticians then said that because of climate change, this is now a “four hundred year flood”. But the kind of weather event that is producing these enormous rainfalls leading to the flooding actually occurs about twice a year now. It is just the question where the downpour comes and if it can dissipate in flat land, or if it comes down in the mountains, washing away everything in the valley. So that “four hundred year flood” is probably occurring more like once a decade but in different places in the future.