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Why ‘Hundred-Year’ Weather Events Are Happening More Than Once Every 100 Years

Climate change is leading not only to droughts, wildfires, and extreme weather. It’s also leading to oxymorons—at least when it comes to what are known as hundred-year storms, floods, and other events.

Environmental scientists have gotten so good at reading weather history that they can characterize some severe storms or floods as likely to occur in a given area only once in 100 years—or even 500 years or a thousand years. That’s where the oxymoron comes in. As climate change leads to greater meteorological volatility, the one in 100—or 500 or 1,000—year events are occurring twice or three times or more in those windows. Since 1999, there have been nine storms along the North Carolina coast that qualify as hundred or thousand year events. From 2015 to 2019, one suburb of St. Louis experienced three major floods, two of which met the criteria for hundred-year events. One study by the Montreal-based carbon removal project Deep Sky calculates that the frequency of deadly hurricanes has jumped 300%, with 100-year storms now forecast to occur once every 25 years.

Climate change is also redefining what qualifies as one of these rare and intense events. “In April, an extreme rainfall event hit the Mississippi Valley, including Arkansas, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee,” says climate scientist Andrew Pershing, chief program officer at Climate Central, an advocacy and communications group. “Some of our colleagues at the World Weather Attribution group did a study and calculated that it was a 100-year event based on today’s climate, but without climate change it would have been more like a 500-year event.”

Driving the more frequent events is what Pershing describes as a “thirstier” atmosphere, one that is hotter and thus capable of holding more moisture. “We have a supercharged water cycle and that means that when you get a rain event it has a better chance of being a bigger event than it used to be,” says Pershing.

In addition to hurricanes, floods, and storms, heat waves, droughts, and wildfires can be projected out over centuries. “A hotter atmosphere can hold more water, but if you squeeze that moisture out over a mountain range like what happens in the west, then you end up with a much drier air mass,” says Pershing. “The atmosphere then wants to suck the moisture out of the ground and so droughts get more severe.” (https://time.com/7289719/hundred-year-weather-events-happen-more-often/)

Based on the information in the text, decide which of the following statements is true.