18.07.2021 – 20:53
Rising temperatures and an increasingly weak Jetstream: Due to climate change, more extreme weather events occur in Germany, such as rising water levels. Even the Moon causes problems.
More than 110 people have lost their lives as a result of the floods, which have swept away and destroyed entire roads in the past week. The whereabouts of thousands of people are unknown. The shock is great on people who have lost relatives, but also any material good they had. Floods of this magnitude have occurred once every few decades in Germany, but with climate change extreme weather events may occur more frequently, meteorologists predict.
“Extreme rainfall will be more frequent in a warmer world,” said climate researcher Andreas Fink of the Karlsruhe Institute for Meteorology and Climate Studies in an interview with DW.
Warmer air receives more water
One reason for this is that as the earth warms, so does the atmosphere. “For every increase in temperature by one degree Celsius, the atmosphere can receive about 7% more moisture,” says Dr. Sebastian Sippel from the Institute for Climate and Atmosphere of the University of Zurich in a press release. “This increase in humidity due to heat leads to a long-term trend of increasing rainfall and the peculiarities of torrential rains.”
Experts have no doubt that man-made climate change is warming our atmosphere. “In 2021, the question no longer arises whether climate change has brought this consequence,” says in a statement Dr. Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, head of the research group at the Institute of Geography from Humboldt University in Berlin about the current floods in Germany. “The question that still needs to be answered is how big this effect is.”
Weakened Jetstream
There is a consensus in scientific circles about thermodynamic changes, that is, about the increasingly warm atmosphere and its increased capacity to accept moisture. Another aspect that has not yet been conclusively clarified, but that is very likely, affects extreme weather phenomena such as floods in Germany and neighboring countries as well as hot currents off the west coast of the US and Canada.
These are air currents, which are responsible for the high and low pressure areas that rapidly dominate the moderate geographical areas. Climate researcher Andreas Fink thinks the Jetstream, a west wind with a width of about 9 miles around the North Pole, has weakened in recent years and instead of the previous flow has turned into waves.
“These waves remain in place and may, depending on where they are, create hot currents, such as those we have seen in North America, or cause flooding,” Fink explains.
High and low pressures no longer move forcefully. “In a low-pressure area (like Bernd which caused heavy rainfall and current flooding) it was precisely this phenomenon that this situation remained concentrated in one place.”
Experts think Jetstream is weakening because it is activated by temperature changes between the Arctic and the Tropics. In the Arctic temperatures are rising and temperature changes are becoming smaller, and consequently weaker air currents.
Worst floods due to the Moon?
One last point of concern regarding high water levels. In the coming decades water levels in tides and ebbs will be more extreme than normal. The reason for this are irregularities in the trajectory of the Moon. This happens once every 18 years. But when it happens next time in the 2030s, sea level will be rising as a result of global warming and that is a cause for concern.
“In the middle of the 18.6-year lunar cycle, tides and ebbs on Earth are suppressed: tides are lower and ebbs are higher,” the US space agency, NASA, said on its official website. . “In the other half of the cycle, the water levels become more extreme: the tide gets higher and the tide gets lower.”
Researchers think that there will be constant flooding that could have catastrophic consequences. Combined with the growing number of extreme climate phenomena, which brings with it climate change. This is very disturbing news./DW