What's with all the floods?
As I have observed the recent goings on in the world, via television and Internet news sources, I have noticed that there seems to be a great deal of flooding going on. In Latin America, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pakistan, India, and Slovenia there have been many floods. This has been tropical storm/hurricane season so it makes sense that there would be flooding, but it seems like there has been even more than usual.
Pakistan has had the worst of these floods and is written about by BBC's .
The UN estimates that the humanitarian crisis is now larger than the combined effects of the three worst natural disasters to strike in the past decade. These include the Asian tsunami and the major earthquakes that devastated Kashmir and Haiti.
Some scientists attribute the flooding, at least in part, to climate change. With warmer oceans, monsoons pick up more water that is then dumped over the land. This, combined with the jet stream keeping the monsoon over the land longer, seem to have increased the amount of water falling in the area.
In August 2010, more than half of the normal monsoon rain fell in only one week. Typically it is spread over three months.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10958760
So the floods are caused mostly by the seasonal weather seen every year, but have been more widespread and devastating this year because of a greater quantity of water. This leaves me with another question. Is it Global Warming or just an anomaly?
