Hurricane Helene crossed the Gulf of Mexico at a time when sea surface temperatures were at record highs and then barreled into a region where heavy rains had left the ground saturated. The result was historic, catastrophic flooding.

One key question is how soon we might expect history to repeat itself. Our rapidly warming planet has tilted the odds in favor of some extreme weather events in a way that means we can expect some events that had been extremely rare to start occurring with some regularity. Our first stab at understanding climate change's influence on Helene was released on Wednesday, and it suggests that rainfall of the sort experienced by the Carolinas may now be a once-in-70-year event, which could have implications for how we rebuild some of the communities shattered by the rain.

Rapid attribution

The quick analysis was done by the World Weather Attribution project, which has developed peer-reviewed methods of looking for the fingerprints of climate change in major weather events. In general, this involves identifying the key weather patterns that produced the event and then exploring their frequency using climate models run with and without the carbon dioxide we've added to the atmosphere.

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As of Monday morning, if one wanted to grasp the historic nature of flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Helene in western parts of North Carolina and the surrounding areas, the logical place to begin is at the National Climatic Data Center.

This federal office maintains the world's largest climate data archive and provides historical perspective to put present-day weather conditions and natural disasters into context in a warming world due to climate change.

Unfortunately, the National Climatic Data Center is based in Asheville, North Carolina. As I write this, the center's website remains offline. That's because Asheville, a city in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains, is the epicenter of catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Helene that has played out over the last week. The climate data facility is inoperable because water and electricity services in the region have entirely broken down due to flooding.

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As of Monday morning, if one wanted to grasp the historic nature of flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Helene in western parts of North Carolina and the surrounding areas, the logical place to begin is at the National Climatic Data Center.

This federal office maintains the world's largest climate data archive and provides historical perspective to put present-day weather conditions and natural disasters into context in a warming world due to climate change.

Unfortunately, the National Climatic Data Center is based in Asheville, North Carolina. As I write this, the center's website remains offline. That's because Asheville, a city in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains, is the epicenter of catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Helene that has played out over the last week. The climate data facility is inoperable because water and electricity services in the region have entirely broken down due to flooding.

Read full article

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