January was full of extreme winter storms. Climate change likely played a role

Winter storm and flood warnings continue this week for millions of Americans after a weekend of flash flooding in states like Pennsylvania and Illinois, where many residents were forced to evacuate their homes as water took on. It's the third weekend this month that large swaths of the country have been inundated with extreme winter conditions – a trend made increasingly likely by climate change, recent analyzes show.

In northeastern Illinois, unusually warm temperatures destabilized an ice pack on the Kankakee River and unleashed major flooding, prompting evacuations about 200 houses. “There's always ice backup this time of year, but I've never seen it this bad,” one resident he told a local news station.

Several residents in the Pittsburgh metro area were as well was forced to evacuate on Sunday — a person with a ladder — after the state saw record rainfall as a coastal storm drenched much of the Northeast. At one point, about 15 million Americans in the region were under a flood watch that day, while another eight million faced winter and snow warnings. ABC News reported.

Arkansas residents were also found inundated by flash floods after high water levels in the Cache River caused levees to fail Sunday night. Winter storms last weekend brought freezing rain to northern and central parts of the state, and the National Weather Service said the river was at highest water levels in the last six years.

The weekend flooding caps a month that has been particularly active with winter storms, which recent reports say are largely caused by human-caused climate change.

ClimaMeter, an international consortium of climate scientists, released a rapid performance analysis last week that looked at the winter storm systems that occurred January 12-14 across large areas of the United States. The report found that January saw increased rainfall mainly due to climate change, with natural climate variability playing a moderating role.

“Our analysis reveals that U.S. winter storms remain a tangible threat, occurring with temperatures similar to those of the past but causing increased precipitation of snow or rain,” Favide Faranda, a scientist at the Pierre-Simon-Laplace Institute based in of France and a co-author of the study, said in a statement. “These findings impose additional challenges on adaptation strategies to a globally warming climate, where winter storms still have the potential to cause significant disruption.”

The mid-January storms brought extremely cold temperatures from the Northwest to the Midwest, disrupted ground and air travel, caused power outages for hundreds of thousands of households and triggered severe winter warnings in more than 17 states.

The survey also showed that many of the areas that flooded last weekend are also expected to see more extreme flooding in the coming years due to climate change. The latest National Climate Assessment projects that increasing precipitation will be among the most severe in the Northeast. And city and state data show that northeastern Illinois is already experiencing a marked uptick in flooding, which is now believed to be Chicago's most pressing climate risk.

As storms stall in the Northeast, California and other western states are bracing for a heavy downpour as an atmospheric river shuts down the region. Meteorologists of the National Meteorological Service warned this week that the event – which acts like a fast-moving river of moist air high in the atmosphere – could bring damaging winds, rain and flooding to much of the West Coast from Wednesday morning into Friday.

These storms are also likely to be affected by global warming.

The ClimaMeter consortium ran an analysis of the Jan. 22 winter storm in San Diego. The city is known for its dry climate, but was caught off guard by an unexpectedly strong Pacific front last week. The West Coast is a bit of an oddity when it comes to climate impacts. While the region remains in severe drought, when storms hit, they tend to release more and more water over the years, a growing body of research has shown, which can cause major runoff and flooding. Floods in Southern California, for example, have become 15 percent wetter over the past two decades, according to the consortium's report.

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