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Something strange is happening with US rainfall this year

Rainfall video
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

California is in an extreme drought, but the South has been inundated with torrential flood-causing rains this spring, and the North East was hammered by one of the worst winters ever.

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A new video, courtesy of NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio, shows just how drastically different rainfall has been across the US in 2015. As you can see in the screenshot above, the country is basically split down the middle along the Rocky Mountains in terms of rainfall.

The areas without any color overlaid on the map, Southern California for instance, didn't receive any rain between the beginning of 2015 and July 16. But as the colors darken from green, to yellow, to red, and even purple the rainfall totals rise.

The purple areas, Louisiana, Illinois, Northern Texas, and Oklahoma all received somewhere around 1900 millimeters of rain, that's over 6 feet.

These ridiculously high amounts of rainfall Texas received resulted in intense flooding in the spring.

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There was so much water that highways turned into rivers, washing cars downstream.

Climate change may be playing a role with this weirdness. As climate patterns change weather will become more extreme, giving raise to both longer and more severe droughts and to fiercer rainfalls.

"Just like steroids make a baseball player stronger, climate change exacerbates many of our weather extremes, making many of them, on average, worse than they would have been naturally," Katharine Hayhoe, director of Texas Tech University's Climate Science Center, told Scientific American.

An extreme weather system on the way could help even out these rainfall levels. An extremely strong el Nino, forecasted to be so strong it's gotten the nickname "Godzilla el Nino," is building in the Pacific Ocean and preparing to assault the West Coast with heavy rainfalls.

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So much rain is expected that some experts expect flooding and landslides. But on the bright side, it could start helping to relieve the West's drought, though it's not likely to be enough to make up for years of missing precipitation.

 

NASA
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