The torrential rain and following flooding that devastated Louisiana last month was made more likely by human-caused climate change, according to an assessment released Wednesday by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and partner scientists with World Weather Attribution (WWA). “While we concluded that 40 percent is the minimum increase in the chances of such rains, we found that the [most] likely impact of climate change is a near doubling of the odds of such a storm,” Karin van der Wiel, a research associate at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, said in a press release.
The assessment is based on a statistical analysis of rainfall observations and two high-resolution climate models. “This was by far the hardest fast attribution study we have done, given all the different small-scale weather types that cause precipitation in the region,” said WWA member Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute in The Netherlands. “It was encouraging to find that our multi-model methods worked even for such a complicated case.”
The flooding, which resulted from record breaking rain fall in the region around Baton Rouge, La., has claimed 13 lives as of Aug. 17, according to officials.. More than 30,000 people had to be rescued and more than 60,000 homes have been damaged.
