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Weather
It was nearly 109 degrees Fahrenheit in Paris yesterday according to Accuweather, breaking the previous all-time high-temperature record by more than 3 degrees. The story was the same in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany, which all broke all-time records on Wednesday only to break them again on Thursday.
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The U.S. heatwave over the weekend (and it was hot — New York and Boston both set high temp records on Saturday) overshadowed some disturbing new photos that emerged late last week of vast fires in Siberia due to dried out swaths of peatland (aka bogs or swamps) that are usually frozen and soggy at […]
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The National Weather Service warned that a “widespread and dangerous heat wave is building in the central and eastern U.S. this weekend – with more than a hundred fifty million people under heat watches and warnings, as the actual air temperature is forecast to reach at least 95 degrees for more than half the population of the continental U.S. through the weekend.
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We wrote on Friday that Tropical Storm Barry had the potential to inflict unprecedented damage on New Orleans, and while the storm caused serious flooding and power outages to 700,000 people, the storm has weakened to a tropical depression as it continues to slowly move north through Louisiana. As NPR explained, the National Weather Service […]
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On Wednesday, New Orleans got a preview of coming disasters. Severe thunderstorms that dumped between 6 and 7 inches of rain on the city in just 3 hours prompted tornado warnings and inundated the downtown area with water, causing transportation snarls and even forcing City Hall to close. Just as government forecasters announced that they expect 2019 to break annual flood records nationwide, the first real storm threat of the season “Barry” is lurking in the Gulf of Mexico setting its sights on the Louisiana coast (possibly New Orleans) but it is still not clear where it will make landfall.
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Yesterday, nearly a month’s worth of rain fell in just one hour in the Washington D.C. metro area–making it one of the area’s top 10 wettest July days ever recorded. As the Washington Post reported, “The sheets of rain, with nowhere to run off, turned major roads into rivers while streams and creeks shot up 10 feet in […]
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On Independence Day, Anchorage, Alaska hit its highest temperature in recorded history — 90 degrees — by five degrees and beat the previous high for the 4th of July by more than twenty degrees, as records were broken all around the state. However, other cities in Alaska had hit 90 degrees before, but these are rare events, but more records could fall according to Accuweather because Alaska currently sits under a “heat dome” that will last into this week.
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On Sunday, residents of Guadalajara, Mexico woke up to find their city under nearly 5 feet of ice that fell overnight as hail. The region’s Governor, Enrique Alfaro told AFP, “I’ve never seen such scenes in Guadalajara. Then we ask ourselves if climate change is real. These are never-before-seen natural phenomenons,” he said. “It’s incredible.” […]
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By Miro Korenha and Alexandra Patel As tornadoes increase in range and frequency across the United States, a group of scientists has been using drones to better understand tornadoes and forecast them in an effort to save lives. Project TORUS has mobilized over 50 researchers and students to follow severe thunderstorms and collect enough data […]
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Summer snow is rare but that is just what happened in the mountains west of Denver on Friday, where nearly two feet fell on the first official day of summer. According to CNN, Steamboat Springs, Colorado averages 0.1 inches of snow in June, with May 6 being the average last day of snowfall during a […]
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Just as Congress finally passed a $19B disaster relief law last week, then this news from Congress’ investigatory arm — The General Accounting Office — which issued a report stating, according to E&E News,that the Federal Emergency Management Agency “failed to answer 2.3 million phone calls to its disaster assistance helpline during an eight-week period […]
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According to a new study in the journal Science Advances, meeting the Paris Climate Agreement’s goals of keeping the rise of global average temperatures to 1.5° C could substantially mitigate heat-related mortality in U.S. cities. This new study is one of the first to investigate how future climate scenarios might impact heat-related fatalities in […]
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