What caused the catastrophic flooding in Europe? You guessed it, severe blocking from a extremely anomalous wavy jet stream which resulted in a cut off low over Central Europe south of a bridged ridging situation… somewhat like a Rex block. 1/…
This long lived Northern Hemisphere blocking pattern is also partially responsible for the heatwaves we have seen lately. And yes scientists like @JFrancisClimate @MichaelEMann have concluded, in different ways, that climate change is causing amplified, sluggish steering. 2/…
Add to that the juiced up atmosphere due to a climate changed background of warmer air surrounding the storm and you expect more moisture laden systems. So while a rare flood like this can happen in the past, extremes like this are made more frequent and more extreme due to CC.
In layman terms the atmosphere has a major traffic jam, which caused a storm to stall and dump monstrous rain over Europe. These traffic jams also cause historic heatwaves like the one in the Pacific NW. This is all made worse by a climate changed world.
In the first graphic the red is the warmer ridging causing the block and the blue is the upper level storm causing the rain. You can see how the blue cutoff low is trapped below the blocking.
The blue is the cutoff, slow moving storm.
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