How wild was the weather this week? One image tells the story.

No image can fully capture the confluence of extreme weather events that are disrupting the United States this week, battering the country from coast to coast with blizzards, intense flooding, high winds and even tornadoes.

But one card comes close.

Every weekday morning at exactly 8:30 a.m., the Federal Emergency Management Agency releases what it calls its “hazard outlook,” a map designed to show the threats expected in the coming days. The goal is to help emergency managers and other officials across the country prepare for what lies ahead.

Lately, those cards have started to look like abstract art, or just crayons gone wild. On Monday, FEMA’s hazard map showed areas of heavy rain, freezing rain, heavy snow, heavy precipitation, dangerous cold, high winds and general severe weather. Apparently only four of the fifty states did not face some worrisome threat.

By Thursday the picture had somehow become even worse. In addition to heavy snow, heavy rain and high winds, the flood risk extended from the Maine-New Hampshire border all the way to Alabama.

It wasn’t always this way. In the second week of January, a decade ago, FEMA’s hazard maps were simple by comparison: high winds in the upper plains, heavy rain around the Florida Panhandle, minor flooding, drought in parts of the West. It went smoothly in entire parts of the country – without any problems, at least from an emergency management perspective.

That pattern – local problems in parts of the country, with much of the map showing no hazards – was much the same five years ago.

Of course, severe winter storms are nothing new, and no weather event can automatically be attributed to climate change. But as the planet warms, the atmosphere can hold more water, making severe weather more likely.

Jeremy Greenberg, director of operations for FEMA’s Response Directorate, has noticed the hazard map becoming busier.

“The duration, frequency and intensity of the hazards increase over time,” Mr. Greenberg said. “It’s becoming more and more common for this map to look like this, and we’re dealing with a variety of hazards.”

Disasters in the United States used to follow a fairly predictable pattern, Greenberg said. Winter brought snow; spring brought floods and summer and early fall brought hurricanes, with hopefully some respite before the cycle would begin again.

Now those seasonal shifts are becoming less meaningful. “A snowstorm in the Rockies in the winter is very normal,” he said. “A tornado in Alabama in the winter is not.”

Brock Long, who served as FEMA administrator during the Trump administration, said the growing number of disasters is putting pressure not only on the agency but also on emergency managers at all levels of government.

FEMA’s daily hazard map has become a kind of illustrated guide to catastrophe, a multicolored warning of the coming disaster.

Mr. Greenberg sees a silver lining in the relentless parade of severe weather: It could grab Americans’ attention and help them understand that the world around them is changing and they need to be ready.

“The dangers are real,” Mr. Greenberg said.