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A wildfire broke out in Southern California on Friday. By Monday morning, the blaze had burned more than 20,000 acres. Another fire in the northern part of the state last week forced about 29,000 people to evacuate. Both incidents underscore how wildfires are getting bigger and more intense.
This past weekend, much of the western United States was hit by record temperatures of over 50 degrees Fahrenheit. (Meteorologists say the temperature won’t cool down anytime soon.)
And early Monday morning, Hurricane Beryl, which made history last week as the earliest Category 5 hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean, made landfall in East Texas as a Category 1 storm. Torrential rain and strong winds are moving across the eastern half of the United States this week.
Judson Jones, a meteorologist and reporter for The New York Times’ Weather Data team, has been covering these extreme weather events, turning to forecasting models and talking to experts for clarity. While the events reflect an overall shift in the world’s climate, Jones tries to analyze them as separate phenomena.
In an interview, which has been edited and condensed, he explained why the weather events occurred and predicted more disasters that would cost billions of dollars.
Record-breaking heat waves, earliest Category 5 hurricane in Atlantic — it seems like an intense moment in the weather. What do you think about these events?
I try to separate them. Yet the atmosphere is interconnected and you can often find a connection between ongoing weather events.
What we are seeing now with this hurricane is that it is being driven in part by the high pressure areas that are responsible for the heat waves that occur in the United States.
Is the ocean temperature warming, allowing the hurricane to gain strength faster?
What we’re seeing in the Atlantic are the exact same temperatures that we would normally see in September in this region. That’s the height of hurricane season, so it was no surprise to me that one formed and intensified rapidly.
There will probably be a lull. The dry, dusty air blowing off the west coast of Africa can suppress the formation of hurricanes, limiting the moisture in the air and thus the growth of tropical systems.
What we do know is that the temperature in the Atlantic Ocean will still be high. As we get closer to the peak of hurricane season, the conditions that limit the formation of hurricanes will diminish, allowing these storms to actually form in late August and early September.
I expect to see a map showing multiple named storms occurring simultaneously in the Atlantic Ocean, similar to what we saw last year.
Temperatures can tell you what to expect, but are you still surprised by the speed, frequency or timing of a storm?
Unlike Hurricane Otis last year, which took meteorologists by surprise, the forecasting models that we use actually predicted rapid intensification of this storm. As a meteorologist, it wasn’t that surprising to see that rapid intensification of this storm. But what’s still astonishing, even when I talk to my sources who are experts in this field and have been studying this stuff forever, is how similar this is to the two most intense hurricane seasons we’ve ever seen: 2005 and 1933. It’s a scenario where we say, “Get ready, here we go.”
It seems that many people feel that these events are setting the stage for what we can expect. Can we predict this?
There are a lot of climate change experts who have started studying what hurricanes might look like in the future, and a lot of what they’ve seen is that we’re probably going to see more of these warmer ocean temperatures.
Even if you look at past data, the ocean temperatures right now, where Beryl formed, are incredibly warmer than they were at any point in 1933. We see this trend of ocean temperatures gradually getting warmer because the ocean is trying to harness that heat from the air and absorb it. The warmer the Earth gets, the warmer the ocean temperatures are going to get. What that means is that we could see a more rapid intensification of storms. It’s a pretty realistic expectation that more storms are going to get into those higher categories.
you wrote that seven recent extreme heat waves have already cost California more than $7 billion. Is that what we can expect — economically speaking — in the future?
By adapting our infrastructure, we survive extremes. We can’t just throw our hands up and say, “Let it happen.” There are really smart people who come up with solutions.
As for billion-dollar disasters, we know they’re increasing. We’re not just talking about heat waves. We’re talking about cold snaps. We’re talking about hurricanes. We’re talking about hail and tornadoes. It only takes one thunderstorm with big hail over a major city and you’ve got a billion-dollar disaster — the insurance companies have to pay for every roof and every car.
Last year I asked you about atmospheric riversEl Niño and La Niña. You said you didn’t want to “overhype” anything — do you still feel that way a year later?
My answer is much the same: these weather patterns affect people in different ways. If you’re in California, you’ll experience more weather whiplash than any other state. People there go from extreme drought to extreme flooding in what seems like overnight.
The best thing you can do is know what to do when a storm is coming.
What’s important moving forward is not to throw our hands in the air, but to look out for each other. The National Weather Service and the CDC worked together to create a heat risk forecast for the entire continental United States. They try to inform people about the dangers of the deadliest weather disasters in the United States.
