Seven people are missing in Western Australia after parts of the outback in the country’s largest and least populated state were drenched with more than 17.5 centimeters of rain in 24 hours last weekend.

The record-breaking rain flooded parts of the Nullarbor Plain, a vast, largely arid area, closing roads and shutting down the main rail link to the east, both crucial freight links.

“This is not typical weather for the south-east of Western Australia,” said a warning from the state Department of Fire and Emergency Services.

The missing people, including four children, have not been seen for more than a day after leaving Kalgoorlie-Boulder, an outback town of 30,000, in two vehicles on Sunday, according to police in Western Australia.

One car was driven alone by an “older driver,” while the other car was believed to have had “an older driver and five other occupants, including four children” between the ages of 7 and 17, a police statement said. The missing people, a family, are believed to have returned home to the remote Aboriginal community of Tjuntjuntjarra, 400 miles to the northeast.

“There are concerns for the occupants of these two vehicles due to severe weather conditions” that have hampered search efforts, with low cloud hampering an aerial search, a police spokesman said. “It is not known how much food and water residents have in their possession.”

Since Friday morning, Rawlinna, an isolated community of 33 people, has received more than six inches of rain, more than half the region’s average annual rainfall of about six inches, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.

Photos posted on social media by Rawlinna Station, Australia’s largest sheep farm, show submerged farm equipment as Craig Chandler, a supervisor at the station, gets into a kayak to rescue chickens and move around the site.

“The Nullarbor is soaking it up and will be completely rejuvenated by this deluge, but I’m not so sure our buildings, possessions and trinkets will be so lucky,” said a message on the station’s radio. Facebook page on Monday.

Australia is in the middle of summer and extreme weather has also hit other parts of Western Australia. In the coastal resort town of Exmouth, in the state’s far north, temperatures were forecast to top 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday, and meteorologists have warned that a tropical cyclone could be approaching the state.

A storm system that lashed parts of the south with heavy rain on Saturday was expected to reach the northeast, bringing the risk of coastal flooding and strong winds, forecasters said.

The City of Charleston, SC, more than twenty roads closed in the city center due to heavy rain and high water.

Some reports indicated up to 3 inches of rain fell in the downtown area, said Marc Chenard, forecaster with the Weather Prediction Center. An area on the waterfront reported nearly two inches of rain within an hour, he said.

Isle of Palms, a South Carolina city of 4,300 residents about 15 miles east of Charleston, is home to police posted a message on social media urging residents “not to drive now if not absolutely necessary” as water levels continued to rise.

A tornado warning was posted for parts of the Florida Panhandle and southeastern Georgia until 2 p.m., Mr. Chenard said. A number of tornado warnings that were issued have now expired.

In Coffee County, Georgia, high winds damaged the roof of a mobile home and uprooted several trees on Saturday, said Steve Carver, Coffee County emergency management director and chief of the fire department. No injuries have been reported.

The National Weather Service said a subtropical jet streamcombined with moist air from areas including the Gulf of Mexico, would result in widespread severe weather across much of the eastern United States through Sunday.

Severe thunderstorms are possible, as well as hail.

As the storm intensifies, it is expected to move along the East Coast and reach southern New England by early Sunday morning, the Weather Service said.

High winds and sleet are forecast for northern New England Saturday night through Sunday morning, while lake-effect snow will sweep across the lower Great Lakes through Monday morning.

Accumulations of 6 to 12 inches of snow were possible in New York’s Adirondacks by late Saturday afternoon, Mr. Chenard said.

“It will be cold and windy behind the system tomorrow during the day, with some snow showers lingering,” he added.

Forecasters said up to two inches of rain could fall in the New York City region Sunday morning, with the highest totals expected in northeastern New Jersey. Peak rains are expected from 8pm on Saturday and into early Sunday.

A lingering rain won’t last very long but will be “heavy for a short time,” Mr. Chenard said, affecting northern New Jersey, New York City and the Hudson Valley.

Minor to moderate flooding may be associated with high water levels along western Long Island Sound, Jamaica and western Great South Bay on Saturday evening and Sunday morning. forecasters said.

Mr. Chenard added that it was possible that snow showers could move through New York City on Sunday evening, although an accumulation was unlikely.

“Expect heavy rain, coastal flooding and high winds this weekend,” says the National Weather Service of New York, NY. said on social media. “The potential for strong winds will also remain behind the storm into Monday.”

By this time of year, rain should drench large areas of the Amazon rainforest. Instead, a punishing drought has kept the rain at bay, creating dry conditions for fires that have engulfed hundreds of square miles of rainforest that normally doesn’t burn.

The fires have turned the end of the dry season in the northern part of the giant rainforest into a crisis. Firefighters have struggled to control massive blazes that have sent choking smoke to cities across South America.

A record number of fires so far this year in the Amazon has also raised questions about what awaits the world’s largest tropical rainforest when the dry season begins in June in the much larger southern part of the jungle.

Last month, Venezuela, northern Brazil, Guyana and Suriname, which cover large parts of the northern Amazon, recorded the highest number of fires in February that year, according to US State Department figures. The Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, which has been monitoring fires in the rainforest for 25 years. Fires were also burning in Colombia’s Andean highlands, as well as in parts of that country’s Amazon region.

The fires in the Amazon, which extend into nine South American countries, are the result of an extreme drought fueled by climate change, experts say.

The region is feeling the effects of a natural weather phenomenon known as El Niño, which could worsen dry conditions, which have been exacerbated by extremely high temperatures this year.

That has made the rainforest more vulnerable to fast-spreading fires, said Ane Alencar, scientific director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in Brazil.

“The climate is making South America’s forests more flammable,” she said. “It creates opportunities for forest fires.”

As countries continue to burn fossil fuels and the planet reaches the highest average temperatures recorded by scientists, a grueling year of fires is expected around the world. Severe fires have already ravaged large parts of the United States and Australia, and a worse season is forecast for Canada, where more hectares burned last year than ever before.

Another year of devastating fires could be especially damaging in the Amazon, where large amounts of carbon dioxide are stored in trees and soil. It is also home to 10 percent of the plants, animals and other living organisms on our planet.

If deforestation, fires and climate change continue to worsen, large areas of forest could turn into grasslands or weakened ecosystems in the coming decades. That would trigger a collapse that could release up to 20 years’ worth of global carbon emissions into the atmosphere, scientists say, in a huge blow to the fight to curb climate change.

Once this tipping point is crossed, “it may be futile to try to do anything,” says Bernardo Flores, who studies ecosystem resilience at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil.

In January, wildfires burned nearly 4,000 square kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon, a nearly fourfold increase from the same month last year, according to Map biomesa collective of climate-focused nonprofits and research institutions.

In February, more than two-thirds of Brazil’s fires took place in Roraima, the country’s northernmost state. They have burned down homes and subsistence crops in several indigenous villages, creating a thick haze over rural areas and dangerous air quality in the state capital, Boa Vista.

As a result of the prolonged drought, vegetation in this part of the Amazon has become “flammable,” explained Dr. Alencar out. “Roraima looks like a barrel of gunpowder right now.”

Researchers say most of the fires sweeping through the region were initially started by farmers using the slash and burn method to grow new grass on degraded pastures or completely deforest recently deforested land.

Fueled by dry conditions and high temperatures, many of these fires grow out of control and spread miles beyond the area originally burned.

“Fires are contagious,” said Dr. Flores. “They change the ecosystem they pass through and increase the risk to adjacent areas, just like a virus.”

In Roraima, the fires have mainly burned areas within the Lavrado, a unique savannah-like region nestled in the Amazon, said Erika Berenguer, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford and the University of Lancaster.

This ecosystem, known for its wide-open grasslands and a rare population of wild horses, overlaps with several protected areas, including the indigenous Yanomami Reserve, where illegal mining and forest destruction have led to a humanitarian crisis.

After months of scant rainfall, the dense rainforest, which is usually too humid to catch fire, has also become more susceptible to flames.

In Roraima, the fires have now spread to protected forests and indigenous areas in the southern region of the state, according to Haron Xaud, professor at the Federal University of Roraima and researcher at Embrapa Roraima, an institute monitoring the fires.

While fires are common in the drier boreal forests of Canada and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere, they do not occur naturally in the much wetter Amazon rainforest. Tropical forests are not adapted to fires, Dr.

Some of the Amazon’s human-caused wildfires have become ‘megafires’ typically defined as fires that burn more than 100,000 hectares of land or that have an unusually significant effect on people and the environment. These types of fires, Dr. Flores said, will become more common as the planet warms and deforestation damages the Amazon’s ability to recover.

Environmental factors are already changing the Amazon. Dry seasons are getting longer and average rainfall during those periods, when rain decreases but does not stop completely, has already fallen by a third since the 1970s, Dr Berenguer said. That has made El Niños increasingly dangerous.

“If you put all these factors together, you have the conditions for a perfect storm – the perfect firestorm,” said Dr. Berenguer.

The fires in the Amazon have had a striking effect on CO2 emissions. In February, forest fires in Brazil and Venezuela emitted almost 10 million tons of carbon, the most ever recorded in the month and about as much as Switzerland emits in a year, according to European Commission data. Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

The El Niño pattern should subside within a few months, bringing some calm to the Amazon.

But more devastating fires could break out if the parched ground does not receive enough rain in the crucial wetter months ahead, Dr Alencar said.

“The question is whether the forest can recover before the dry season, and whether the Amazon can recharge its batteries,” she said. “Now it all depends on the rain.”

Simon Posada contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia.

By this time of year, rain should drench large areas of the Amazon rainforest. Instead, a punishing drought has kept the rain at bay, creating dry conditions for fires that have engulfed hundreds of square miles of rainforest that normally doesn’t burn.

The fires have turned the end of the dry season in the northern part of the giant rainforest into a crisis. Firefighters have struggled to control massive blazes that have sent choking smoke to cities across South America.

A record number of fires so far this year in the Amazon has also raised questions about what awaits the world’s largest tropical rainforest when the dry season begins in June in the much larger southern part of the jungle.

Last month, Venezuela, northern Brazil, Guyana and Suriname, which cover large parts of the northern Amazon, recorded the highest number of fires in February that year, according to US State Department figures. The Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, which has been monitoring fires in the rainforest for 25 years. Fires were also burning in Colombia’s Andean highlands, as well as in parts of that country’s Amazon region.

The fires in the Amazon, which extend into nine South American countries, are the result of an extreme drought fueled by climate change, experts say.

The region is feeling the effects of a natural weather phenomenon known as El Niño, which could worsen dry conditions, which have been exacerbated by extremely high temperatures this year.

That has made the rainforest more vulnerable to fast-spreading fires, said Ane Alencar, scientific director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in Brazil.

“The climate is making South America’s forests more flammable,” she said. “It creates opportunities for forest fires.”

As countries continue to burn fossil fuels and the planet reaches the highest average temperatures recorded by scientists, a grueling year of fires is expected around the world. Severe fires have already ravaged large parts of the United States and Australia, and a worse season is forecast for Canada, where more hectares burned last year than ever before.

Another year of devastating fires could be especially damaging in the Amazon, where large amounts of carbon dioxide are stored in trees and soil. It is also home to 10 percent of the plants, animals and other living organisms on our planet.

If deforestation, fires and climate change continue to worsen, large areas of forest could turn into grasslands or weakened ecosystems in the coming decades. That would trigger a collapse that could release up to 20 years’ worth of global carbon emissions into the atmosphere, scientists say, in a huge blow to the fight to curb climate change.

Once this tipping point is crossed, “it may be futile to try to do anything,” says Bernardo Flores, who studies ecosystem resilience at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil.

In January, wildfires burned nearly 4,000 square kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon, a nearly fourfold increase from the same month last year, according to Map biomesa collective of climate-focused nonprofits and research institutions.

In February, more than two-thirds of Brazil’s fires took place in Roraima, the country’s northernmost state. They have burned down homes and subsistence crops in several indigenous villages, creating a thick haze over rural areas and dangerous air quality in the state capital, Boa Vista.

As a result of the prolonged drought, vegetation in this part of the Amazon has become “flammable,” explained Dr. Alencar out. “Roraima looks like a barrel of gunpowder right now.”

Researchers say most of the fires sweeping through the region were initially started by farmers using the slash and burn method to grow new grass on degraded pastures or completely deforest recently deforested land.

Fueled by dry conditions and high temperatures, many of these fires grow out of control and spread miles beyond the area originally burned.

“Fires are contagious,” said Dr. Flores. “They change the ecosystem they pass through and increase the risk to adjacent areas, just like a virus.”

In Roraima, the fires have mainly burned areas within the Lavrado, a unique savannah-like region nestled in the Amazon, said Erika Berenguer, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford and the University of Lancaster.

This ecosystem, known for its wide-open grasslands and a rare population of wild horses, overlaps with several protected areas, including the indigenous Yanomami Reserve, where illegal mining and forest destruction have led to a humanitarian crisis.

After months of scant rainfall, the dense rainforest, which is usually too humid to catch fire, has also become more susceptible to flames.

In Roraima, the fires have now spread to protected forests and indigenous areas in the southern region of the state, according to Haron Xaud, professor at the Federal University of Roraima and researcher at Embrapa Roraima, an institute monitoring the fires.

While fires are common in the drier boreal forests of Canada and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere, they do not occur naturally in the much wetter Amazon rainforest. Tropical forests are not adapted to fires, Dr.

Some of the Amazon’s human-caused wildfires have become ‘megafires’ typically defined as fires that burn more than 100,000 hectares of land or that have an unusually significant effect on people and the environment. These types of fires, Dr. Flores said, will become more common as the planet warms and deforestation damages the Amazon’s ability to recover.

Environmental factors are already changing the Amazon. Dry seasons are getting longer and average rainfall during those periods, when rain decreases but does not stop completely, has already fallen by a third since the 1970s, Dr Berenguer said. That has made El Niños increasingly dangerous.

“If you put all these factors together, you have the conditions for a perfect storm – the perfect firestorm,” said Dr. Berenguer.

The fires in the Amazon have had a striking effect on CO2 emissions. In February, forest fires in Brazil and Venezuela emitted almost 10 million tons of carbon, the most ever recorded in the month and about as much as Switzerland emits in a year, according to European Commission data. Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

The El Niño pattern should subside within a few months, bringing some calm to the Amazon.

But more devastating fires could break out if the parched ground does not receive enough rain in the crucial wetter months ahead, Dr Alencar said.

“The question is whether the forest can recover before the dry season, and whether the Amazon can recharge its batteries,” she said. “Now it all depends on the rain.”

Simon Posada contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia.

The sky above Atlanta was blue Thursday morning, but the ground made a crunching sound as you walked over it, soaked from heavy rain the day before that had left the streets muddy with red Georgia clay.

And before the city has a chance to dry out after Wednesday’s storm, another storm is threatening the eastern United States with excessive rain that is “of particular concern.” to forecasters for cities like Atlanta, where another two to three inches could fall Friday through Saturday.

A similar amount of rain drenched Atlanta on Wednesday, filling part of it creeks to flood stage. a NASA computer model shown that topsoil saturation exceeded 65 percent, and in some cases even higher. The boggy ground is preventing new rainfall from penetrating, increasing the risk of flash flooding if new rainfall occurs this weekend.

If the region were to receive the higher portion of the forecast rainfall, it could result in significant flash flooding and rapid rises in already elevated waterways. warned the National Weather Service office in Atlanta.

A few wet months have also kept capacity high elsewhere in the east, especially in the northeast, where more rain is expected to fall this weekend. More than an inch of rain fell in New York’s Central Park on Wednesday. And while the next rainstorm there isn’t expected to be as heavy as expected in the south, the rain forecast for Saturday through Sunday could lead to minor urban nuisance flooding in the city.

Severe storms can cause tornadoes.

Severe storms with damaging winds could produce tornadoes in Atlanta early Sunday morning. While that is not the biggest concern with this storm system, it is possible.

Tornadoes are more likely to form west and south of the city on Friday.

The storms in Texas Friday morning will move eastward during the day, bringing the risk of tornadoes along the Gulf Coast states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

There is still some hesitation among forecasters about how serious the tornado threat could become. As the ingredients needed to form tornadoes – rising moist warm air and changing wind speeds with height – become clearer, forecasters are likely to increase the expected tornado risk in the coming days.

How the forecast could change.

A warm conveyor belt of moisture, similar to the atmospheric rivers that often affect the West Coast, will pull moisture through the south and into the northeast.

Rain is expected to be less heavy in the Northeast than in the South as the southern end of the storm will use most of the available moisture. The storm system is also expected to move quickly through the Northeast, limiting the amount of moisture that can fall. If the storm weakens or more moisture flows, chances could increase, especially in New England, where ground is soaked to similar or higher levels than in the Southeast — but that’s not the likely scenario.

The moisture available to the south and the expected impact of higher altitude winds will allow storms to spread throughout the region. Training occurs when a storm forms over an area and, because a heavy amount of rain falls, creates the environment for another storm to form behind it, and so on. The longer the train, the more rain will fall in an isolated area. Therefore, one inch of rain can fall in one location, and five times that much in a spot a few miles away.

The location of the heaviest rain will depend on where these thunderstorms are located.

It is not likely that the flood risk in the South will end soon. More rain is likely by the end of next week, on top of what could fall this weekend.

That means that for a while, walking on the grass will feel more like walking on gelatin than on solid ground.