Skip to main content

Hurricane Rosa could flood the parched Southwest next week

[ad_1]


Hurricane Rosa could pose a flooding threat to desert southwest and parts of the Rocky Mountains in the middle of next week as the storm makes a sharp turn toward northwestern Mexico. Forecasters are only expecting a couple of inches of rain—nothing like we’ve seen from recent storms out East—but the impermeable ground in the Southwest makes even a short burst of heavy rain a dangerous prospect for people in vulnerable areas.



The eastern Pacific hurricane season is churning out storms in abundance this year. Rosa is the tenth hurricane to form in this part of the world this season, and it’s the first storm to significantly threaten the Mexican coast. Rosa grew into a major hurricane on Thursday afternoon, taking advantage of warm water, moist air, and low wind shear in the environment around it.



Weather models have been strikingly consistent, with the trough picking up the hurricane and moving it toward Mexico and the United States. An upper-level trough in the jet stream will dip over the West Coast this weekend, picking up Hurricane Rosa and forcing it to make a sharp northerly turn toward the Baja Peninsula. The storm will accelerate after it turns north; current forecasts show it making landfall on Tuesday, reaching the United States by the middle of the week. However, the timing is less certain than the track.


Rosa, either as a tropical storm or the remnants of one, will swiftly move across the Southwest and over the Rockies once it comes inland. The current precipitation forecast from the Weather Prediction Center shows one to three inches of rain falling across Arizona and New Mexico with the passage of the storm next week. Thunderstorms that repeatedly move over the same areas could produce even heavier rainfall.



The ground in the desert southwest is relatively impermeable; heavy rain tends to run off rather than soak into the ground like it would in wetter parts of the country. This excess runoff makes even a relatively small amount of rain a significant flooding problem in both urban and rural areas. Flash flooding in desert regions can happen very quickly, with arroyos (dry creeks) flooding miles away from heavy rain.



The remnants of Rosa will continue to swiftly move through the United States next week, merging with other weather systems to bring heavy rain from the Upper Midwest to New England. Rain that falls in places like Minnesota and Maine next week will have a direct link to the remnants of Hurricane Rosa.



Most storms quickly dissipate once they make landfall in northwestern Mexico, typically sparing the American Southwest from dealing with the severe effects of a landfalling storm. Storms that make it through to Arizona and New Mexico are usually tropical depressions or remnant lows by the time they reach that far inland.



Several tropical cyclones have brought extensive flooding and wind damage to the American Southwest over the past couple of decades. The remnants of Hurricane Nora in 1997 were the most damaging in recent memory. Nora reached Arizona as a tropical storm, bringing intense winds to Yuma, Arizona, and leaving behind nine-figure damages from flooding.




[ad_2]

Written By Dennis Mersereau

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

With Operation Popeye, the U.S. government made weather an instrument of war

[ad_1] It was a seasonably chilly afternoon in 1974 when Senators Claiborne Pell, a Democrat from Rhode Island, and Clifford Case, a Republican from New Jersey, strode into the chambers of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for a classified briefing. While the meeting was labeled “top secret,” the topic at hand was rather mundane: They were there to discuss the weather. More specifically, Pell, the chairman of the now-defunct subcommittee for Oceans and International Environment, and his colleague were about to learn the true extent of a secret five-year-old cloud seeding operation meant to lengthen the monsoon season in Vietnam, destabilize the enemy, and allow the United States to win the war. Though it cycled through several names in its history, "Operation Popeye" stuck. Its stated objectives—to ensure Americans won the Vietnam War—were never realized, the revelation that the U.S. government played God with weather-altering warfare changed history. The...
Post a Comment
Read more

University supercomputers are science's unsung heroes, and Texas will get the fastest yet

[ad_1] Supercomputers are powerful machines with great names—Blue Waters, Bridges, Jetstream, Comet. But a new one will soon be joining that list: Frontera. The $60 million machine will live at the University of Texas at Austin and is scheduled to come online next year. “It will be the fastest machine ever deployed at a university in the US,” says Dan Stanzione, the executive director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center. With supercomputers, the title of fastest is a moving target—what’s perhaps more important is not the exact ranking, but that they’re available for researchers to use in the first place. Right now, the fastest supercomputer in the world is called Summit, and it’s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, part of the Department of Energy (DOE), and is specifically tailored for AI. But supercomputers located not at government labs but at universities—like Frontera and its ilk—play a crucial role in the ever...
Post a Comment
Read more