Weather whiplash refers to rapid swings between extreme weather conditions, such as droughts and floods. It is caused by an increasingly erratic water cycle driven by rising temperatures. The atmosphere can hold more moisture, leading to intense droughts when it absorbs water from the surface and severe flooding when it releases that moisture.
Climate change has accelerated the global water cycle due to rising temperatures, which increase evaporation and the movement of water. This has led to more extreme weather events, including both heavy rainfall and prolonged droughts, as the atmosphere becomes 'spongier' and holds more moisture.
Wildfires in California are occurring during winter due to weather whiplash. Record-breaking rainfall in late 2022 and early 2023 led to significant vegetation growth, followed by an unusually dry rainy season in 2023-2024, which turned the vegetation into kindling, fueling the fires.
Weather whiplash can lead to a range of compounding consequences, including rapid snowmelt causing flooding, outbreaks of waterborne diseases after floods, and increased wildfire risks due to vegetation drying out. It also accelerates climate tipping points, such as the release of greenhouse gases from events like Amazon fires.
Since the mid-20th century, weather whiplash events occurring within three months have increased by between 31% and 66%, according to a study published in Nature.
The atmosphere acts like a sponge, absorbing and releasing moisture. Rising temperatures increase its capacity to hold water, intensifying droughts when it absorbs moisture and causing extreme rainfall or flooding when it releases it. This dynamic is a key driver of extreme weather events.
Managing water resources during weather whiplash is challenging because it requires balancing between droughts and floods. For example, empty dams can capture floodwaters but cannot supply water during droughts. Localized solutions are needed, depending on the specific water systems and needs of each region.
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In just 20 minutes, a flicker exploded into a 200-acre monster. They've destroyed ecosystems, innumerable homes, and cost lives. All the things that make up a community, schools, doctor's offices, nursing homes, barber shops, grocery stores, gas stations, rec centers, parks, neighborhoods need that kind of infrastructure. And everywhere you look, it's all gone.
California is no stranger to wildfires. But what's happening this year is different. They're blazing in winter. What would usually be one of the state's wettest months has been extraordinarily dry, as were October, November and December. Approximately six months is the normal seasonal drought for this region, but we are now looking at about eight months since we've had any meaningful rain down here. So the plants are really dry.
The fires are also particularly ferocious. And that's because before it was so dry, California had been hit with record-breaking levels of rainfall. Vegetation grows. Think of it like watering your garden, right? Everything will grow. And then when we get this extended dry period, everything dries out.
Researchers are calling this phenomenon weather whiplash. And the reason that we're being buffeted from one extreme to the other? An increasingly erratic water cycle. The atmosphere can hold more moisture and that means that it will dry out the surface and cause droughts. At the same time, having that moisture in the atmosphere means that when it does rain, we can expect to see more extreme rainfall when it does occur.
So today, how rising temperatures are causing weather whiplash and the devastating consequences these swings can have. From The Guardian, I'm Madeleine Finlay and this is Science Weekly.
Fires and floods, both destructive natural forces. But you might not think of them as related, being that they're at opposite ends of the spectrum of the weather. But at their root is the global water cycle, something you might vaguely remember from school, a diagram with mountains, rivers, the sea and arrows pointing up and down.
The water cycle is the way that water evaporates, goes into the atmosphere, then comes down again as rain or snow and then runs into the ground, the groundwater systems, the rivers, the lakes and so forth, or back to sea eventually perhaps, only to evaporate again and do it all over again. So it's the sun, temperature, radiation that drives the water cycle.
Albert van Dijk is a professor of water science and management at the Australian National University. As he points out, it's the temperature that drives the cycle, as water evaporates and moves around the planet. So, as temperatures have risen, things have been speeding up. If you do think of a water cycle that's got an engine, then the engine is in overdrive and with more heat. One way that you could think about it is that the cycle is turning faster.
Albert and colleagues from around the world have collected data from thousands of ground-based stations and satellites monitoring the Earth from above to track how the global water cycle is responding to climate change. This has been compiled in their 2024 Global Water Monitor Report. We've been doing this for a few years now and of course our records go back further depending on the data available, the satellites available, the stations available, go back to maybe 1979.
And to be honest, every report gets a bit more alarming. What we found this year is that we're seeing pretty clear trends, both in extreme high rainfall as well as in extreme low rainfall or droughts, if you like.
Records for highs and lows in rainfall are being broken increasingly often. But why are we seeing both extremes? You might fairly assume that with rising temperatures, the planet as a whole would simply be getting both hotter and drier, like being in an oven. The question that I often get is how can it get drier and wetter at the same time, right? How can we have more extreme wet conditions as well as extreme dry conditions? There's
There's one key factor, the atmosphere. You can imagine it a bit like a sponge, taking up water and then dropping it out somewhere else. But because of rising temperatures...
It's getting spongier. So if the surface is wet, it mops up, it dries out the surface, much like your clothes dryer might do, and the warmer it is, the more it dries it out. But that water can't stay in the atmosphere. The atmosphere has got very little place to put it, if you like. And so that will have to come out. It will have to rain or snow out of it again. And if the sponge is bigger, as you put it, then that also means that if you wring out that sponge, you'll get more water out of it.
As the atmosphere is heated by the burning of fossil fuels, it's able to hold more water. So during dry weather, it can suck up and hang on to even more water from the ground, making droughts increasingly likely and intense.
Then, during wet weather, all that extra water gets dumped back down in severe flooding events. And this is only set to get worse. Based on physics, you could say it can hold 7% more moisture for every degree warming. So on the basis of that, we should be about up to 10% now. But what we're seeing is that extreme events have increased by more than that in many cases. That's because we're
It's not only the water holding capacity, it's also how climate change is affecting our currents, air currents and weather systems. And that actually adds to the variation in our weather and therefore to the extremes as well. As Albert and his colleagues found, record highs and lows for rainfall are becoming more common, as are the dramatic swings between them.
Inevitably, if you've got more extreme dry and sometimes also more extreme wet conditions, then the chance also increases that you'll have both in short succession. In fact, a recent paper published in Nature looking at this found that since the mid-20th century, whiplash events happening within three months have increased by between 31% and 66%.
And it isn't just the extremes that cause the devastating impacts. The swings themselves are a problem too, as we've seen in Los Angeles. In the winter of 2022-23, California was hit with record-breaking precipitation, which created the conditions for lots of plants to thrive. Then, in LA, this year's rainy season ran at 2% of what's normal, so all that vegetation turned to kindling.
The California fires going on right now are a good example of what you might call whiplash, or you might call it, you know, extreme seesawing, a wet first half year and then a very dry and quite warm second part of the year. And it causes first a buildup of fuel, of that vegetation, and then that vegetation dries out and these kind of massive fires can take hold.
We've seen it here in Australia with the Black Summer fires where we had pretty good rainfall conditions and then suddenly a pretty intense heat wave that caused what we call a flesh drought, so a very rapidly developing drought. And that dried out the vegetation, even where the vegetation doesn't normally dry out.
There are other compounding consequences of weather whiplashes too. We do see that more often that you get, for instance, a very cold winter with a lot of snow buildup and then suddenly a very warm period where all the snow quickly melts and causes flooding. We've seen that in Kazakhstan and Russia last year, for instance, where we had dams fail because of this kind of rapid snow melt and
There are other examples of what you might call seesawing, I suppose. After a flood, if you suddenly get a heat wave, you get issues with outbreaks of waterborne diseases, for instance. Increasing extremes may also be driving us faster towards climate tipping points.
those ecological thresholds beyond which changes to a climate system accelerate, often irreversibly. That's the sort of thing that keeps scientists up at night, I think, is the predictable part of global warming is its response to our emissions. What we don't know is what the planet will throw at us. So...
The Amazon is a good example. This year has been extremely dry in the Amazon. There's been enormous fire activity there. That releases, of course, greenhouse gases, as well as causing lots of health problems and other issues. But those add to the greenhouse gases that we already put in the atmosphere. And that causes feedbacks. In other words, it makes climate change worse. There are others. What happens at the poles, for instance, ice breaks.
storing a lot of water and what that does to, for instance, sea level rise. So there are those tipping points and that's where that sort of, you know, more or less magic one and a half degree comes from. Unfortunately, there's no magic to it and there's no guarantee that these tipping points don't happen with less than one and a half degree warming either. It's just that they're considered more likely beyond that level of warming.
As scientists like Albert continue to make clear, the one thing we have to do is to stop burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible. But because of the greenhouse gases we've already put in the atmosphere, some impacts are now locked in. We need to prepare for floods, fires and droughts.
And as rising temperatures wreak havoc on the global water system and accelerate its engine, weather will also be arriving when we don't expect it. We'll see also things happen that we may be used to, but at times of year where we're not used to it. You know, this fire in California is in the middle of winter. We'll see...
cold snaps as we always have but what you see for instance in many places is that nature wakes up earlier out of its sort of winter slumber and then gets hit with a cold snap that might not be extraordinary in its own right but we see a lot of crop damage that way as well so I think what we're seeing is the patterns that you are used to become less reliable basically and we see that play out almost everywhere in the world.
Preparing for an unpredictable future, regularly swinging between extremes, is going to be difficult. For instance, putting out raging wildfires requires vast quantities of water in places that are, by the very nature of the problem, dry. Last week, LA found that the water tanks supplying Pacific Palisades, where the largest of the fires broke out, were depleted.
Managing water better will help us deal with both extremes, but the best method will depend on where you live. These problems, these challenges are global, but the solutions are often quite local and depending on the nature of your water system. To give an example, some people rely heavily on groundwater. Other people or communities rely heavily on water in dams for their domestic or their irrigation needs. And the way you manage
would deal with your climate and water related challenges varies quite substantially depending on those sorts of questions. But if you can expect both more droughts and more floods, it really creates some unique challenges. For instance, you might use a dam, an empty dam to capture flood flows
But then if the dam is empty, you can't use it to provide supplies in droughts. So that is a problem that's playing out globally is, you know, how should we manage our dams if we can expect both floods and droughts? Can we manage both? My thanks to Professor Albert van Dijk. We've put a link to an article about the Global Water Monitor report in the podcast description. And you can find all of our coverage of the LA wildfires at theguardian.com.
And do look out for tomorrow's episode of our sister podcast, Today in Focus, where The Guardian US's extreme weather correspondent, Gabrielle Cannon, explains what's been happening in California. And that's it for today. This episode was produced by me, Madeline Finlay. It was sound designed by Joel Cox. And the executive producer is Ellie Burey. We'll be back on Thursday. See you then.
Thank you.
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