Weather events like atmospheric rivers and bomb cyclones used to be rare, typically happening in an area no more than once in a decade. Now, it seems like there's a new climate disaster or record broken every season. Most recently, it was a bomb cyclone that turned into an atmospheric river in the Pacific Northwest.
What's happening?
On Nov. 19, a bomb cyclone hit the Pacific Northwest, with the majority of the damage affecting the state of Washington. Its effects were felt as south as Northern California and as north as British Columbia.
Because the bomb cyclone combined with an atmospheric river, meteorologists have called it a "once-in-a-decade storm," and Earth.com examined the increasing frequency of such storms in recent years.
As a report from the University of Miami found, using data from the National Weather Service, bomb cyclones increased by about 40% between 1980 and 2020 in the Atlantic Basin.
Why are bomb cyclones concerning?
Bomb cyclones are described colloquially as winter hurricanes, but the term is already another name for bombogenesis — when warm waters of the ocean collide with cold air above it.
The criteria for this storm to meet bombogenesis was already more than double. This bomb cyclone caused wind speeds upwards of 77 miles per hour in the mountains southeast of Seattle and became one of the region's strongest storms on record.
The atmospheric river caused many of the areas affected by the bomb cyclone to receive a month's worth of rain in a matter of hours, which could have caused floods and landslides.
Professor of atmospheric sciences Ben Kirtman told Earth.com the increase in bomb cyclones is "likely connected to warmer ocean temperatures."
"As the climate system warms, the higher latitudes warm faster than the lower latitudes, and the energy for the system of midlatitude cyclones is that contrast between north and south," Kirtman said.
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What's being done about bomb cyclones?
There is no one direct cause for a bomb cyclone except human-caused planet warming. To counteract the effects of dirty energy, luckily we are seeing changes like former fossil fuel plants transitioning to clean energy and governments creating policies to halt the sales of fossil-fuel-creating vehicles.
At home, it's also possible to make a difference and reduce your carbon footprint by switching to an electric vehicle, eating a plant-based diet, and making eco-friendly changes to your home to reduce your energy use.
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