Last week NOAA released their annual evaluation of 28 separate weather disasters that occurred in 2014 along with a discussion of which if them were affected by trends linked to changing climate and other human factors like changes in land use. \u00a0This evaluation is published by the American Meteorological Society and is based on evaluations from 32 groups of climatologists in 20 different countries.<\/p>\n
In some cases like extreme heat waves, the probability of occurrence has increased due to rising temperatures. \u00a0In other events, no link to changing climate could be seen and these events were attributed to naturally occurring variability in weather. \u00a0Most of the droughts were linked to water use patterns and normal precipitation variability, not climate change. \u00a0Floods were linked to artificial drainage patterns and land use changes from urban development and land subsidence as well as rainfall anomalies.<\/p>\n
There have been a number of articles on this news release. \u00a0A short description of the project can be found from NOAA here<\/a>. \u00a0A good summary list of key findings can be found on this NOAA News post<\/a>. \u00a0EarthSky also published the map from NOAA below showing all the disasters described in the report.\u00a0 Seth Borenstein of AP provided a list of the 14 events that were most likely affected by global warming here<\/a>.\u00a0 An archived slide show from the press briefing is available here<\/a>. \u00a0The full report can be found at\u00a0https:\/\/www.ncdc.noaa.gov\/news\/explaining-extreme-events-2014<\/a>.<\/p>\n
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