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Posts Tagged: environment
Flowering Quince: A Sure Sign of Spring
Spring won't arrive until March 19, but don't tell that to the honey bees foraging on the flowering quince. Flowering quince, an early spring...
A honey bee foraging on flowering quince, a member of the rose family. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
A flowering quince bud makes a great pocket for a honey bee. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Bottoms up! A honey bee determined to bring back food for her colony on this flowering quince. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Feb. 8 is UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day: A Super Science Day
Have you ever wished that you and your family and friends could visit the UC Davis campus and chat with the scientists about their research and see...
Visitors examine the insect specimens at the Bohart Museum of Entomology. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
At the 12th annual Biodiversity Museum Day, Miles Pickard, 4 and his mother Marissa Pickard checked out the Center for Plant Diversity. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
The Paleontology Collection, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, draws scores of visitors during UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Lisa Pacumio with great-horned owl at the California Raptor Center on Old Davis Road. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
A nematode display at the Katherine Esau Science Hall. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Ready for Maggot Art at the Bohart Museum of Entomology Open House?
Children's faces light up when they create maggot art. This is how they do it: They pick up a maggot with feather-tip forceps; dip it into a...
Maggot art in the making. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
In maggot art, is the maggot the artist or is the artist the one who dips it in paint and lets it crawl around on a piece of paper? (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Los Angeles Fire Disaster: 'Bee Platoon' to Help the Beekeepers and the Bees
First responders are fiercely battling five raging wildfires in Los Angeles County, wildfires fueled by dry conditions and the hurricane-force...
Bees are classified by the federal government as livestock government because products from apiculture enter the human food chain. These include honey, propolis, pollen, and royal jelly. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Floods, droughts, then fires: Hydroclimate whiplash is speeding up globally
New research links intensifying wet and dry swings to the atmosphere's sponge-like ability to drop and absorb water
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Key takeaways
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Los Angeles is burning, and accelerating hydroclimate whiplash is the key climate connection.
After years of severe drought, dozens of atmospheric rivers deluged California with record-breaking precipitation in the winter of 2022-23, burying mountain towns in snow, flooding valleys with rain and snow melt, and setting off hundreds of landslides.
Following a second extremely wet winter in southern parts of the state, resulting in abundant grass and brush, 2024 brought a record-hot summer and now a record-dry start to the 2025 rainy season, along with tinder-dry vegetation that has since burned in a series of damaging wildfires.
This is just the most recent example of the kind of “hydroclimate whiplash” – rapid swings between intensely wet and dangerously dry weather – that is increasing worldwide, according to a paper published Jan. 9 in Nature Reviews.
“The evidence shows that hydroclimate whiplash has already increased due to global warming, and further warming will bring about even larger increases,” said lead author Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources and UCLA. “This whiplash sequence in California has increased fire risk twofold: first, by greatly increasing the growth of flammable grass and brush in the months leading up to fire season, and then by drying it out to exceptionally high levels with the extreme dryness and warmth that followed.”
Global weather records show hydroclimate whiplash has swelled globally by 31% to 66% since the mid-20th century, the international team of climate researchers found – even more than climate models suggest should have happened. Climate change means the rate of increase is speeding up. The same potentially conservative climate models project that the whiplash will more than double if global temperatures rise 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The world is already poised to blast past the Paris Agreement's targeted limit of 1.5 C. The researchers synthesized hundreds of previous scientific papers for the review, layering their own analysis on top.
Anthropogenic climate change is the culprit behind the accelerating whiplash, and a key driver is the “expanding atmospheric sponge” – the growing ability of the atmosphere to evaporate, absorb and release 7% more water for every degree Celsius the planet warms, researchers said.
“The problem is that the sponge grows exponentially, like compound interest in a bank,” Swain said. “The rate of expansion increases with each fraction of a degree of warming.”
The global consequences of hydroclimate whiplash include not only floods and droughts, but the heightened danger of whipsawing between the two, including the bloom-and-burn cycle of overwatered then overdried brush, and landslides on oversaturated hillsides where recent fires removed plants with roots to knit the soil and slurp up rainfall. Every fraction of a degree of warming speeds the growing destructive power of the transitions, Swain said.
Many previous studies of climate whiplash have only considered the precipitation side of the equation, and not the growing evaporative demand. The thirstier atmosphere pulls more water out of plants and soil, exacerbating drought conditions beyond simple lack of rainfall.
“The expanding atmospheric sponge effect may offer a unifying explanation for some of the most visible, visceral impacts of climate change that recently seem to have accelerated,” Swain said. “The planet is warming at an essentially linear pace, but in the last 5 or 10 years there has been much discussion around accelerating climate impacts. This increase in hydroclimate whiplash, via the exponentially expanding atmospheric sponge, offers a potentially compelling explanation.”
That acceleration, and the anticipated increase in boom-and-bust water cycles, has important implications for water management.
“We can't look at just extreme rainfall or extreme droughts alone, because we have to safely manage these increasingly enormous influxes of water, while also preparing for progressively drier interludes,” Swain said. “That's why ‘co-management' is an important paradigm. It leads you to more holistic conclusions about which interventions and solutions are most appropriate, compared to considering drought and flood risk in isolation.”
In many regions, traditional management designs include shunting flood waters to flow quickly into the ocean, or slower solutions like allowing rain to percolate into the water table. However, taken alone, each option leaves cities vulnerable to the other side of climate whiplash, the researchers noted.
“Hydroclimate in California is reliably unreliable,” said co-author John Abatzoglou, a UC Merced climate scientist. “However, swings like we saw a couple years ago, going from one of the driest three-year periods in a century to the once-in-a-lifetime spring 2023 snowpack, both tested our water-infrastructure systems and furthered conversations about floodwater management to ensure future water security in an increasingly variable hydroclimate.”
Hydroclimate whiplash is projected to increase most across northern Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, northern Eurasia, the tropical Pacific and the tropical Atlantic, but most other regions will also feel the shift.
“Increasing hydroclimate whiplash may turn out to be one of the more universal global changes on a warming Earth,” Swain said.
In California this week, although winds are fanning the extreme fires, it's the whiplash-driven lack of rain that suspended Southern California in fire season.
“There's not really much evidence that climate change has increased or decreased the magnitude or likelihood of the wind events themselves in Southern California,” Swain said. “But climate change is increasing the overlap between extremely dry vegetation conditions later in the season and the occurrence of these wind events. This, ultimately, is the key climate change connection to Southern California wildfires.”
Under a high warming scenario, California will see an increase in both the wettest and driest years and seasons by later this century.
“The less warming there is, the less of an increase in hydroclimate whiplash we're going to see,” Swain said. “So anything that would reduce the amount of warming from climate change will directly slow or reduce the increase in whiplash. Yet we are currently still on a path to experience between 2 degrees and 3 degrees Celsius of global warming this century — so substantial further increases in whiplash are likely in our future, and we really need to be accounting for this in risk assessments and adaptation activities.”
The research was supported with funding from The Nature Conservancy of California and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
