Saturday, October 08, 2005

Anxiety Index: Do you smell ice-cap in that rain?

It's nerve-wracking, this extreme weather. Look at this graph. I'm not imagining it. It says in this report from 1997 that in NYC, "the amount of precipitation on extreme wet (or snowy) days is likely to increase." For more of the same, check out Ross Gelbspan's "The Heat is Online" page or this recent article here, which connects heavy rainfall to global warming.
So what are the stats? Here is a chart with NYC's average rainfall between 1944 and 1995. According to this chart, the city averaged 44.4 inches per year, with 3.3 inches in the average October. Tropical Storm "Tammy" will be responsible, says the National Weather Service for dumping somewhere between three and five inches of rain on New York (state) this weekend alone. Hmm. When they report on the inches of rainfall for this October, I'll do an update.
You think a little rain is nothing serious? Last night, I was watching BBC news and saw damage in Central America that looked as bad as or worse than the aftermath of Katrina. So far, there are over 600 dead because of flooding there..here's another article.
Meanwhile, as always, capitalism leads to the very BEST solution for this problem.

Update: Rainfall averages and yesterday's rain:
Go to the "weather underground" weather statistics to see today's almanac entry. Yesterday, we had 4.26 inches of rain, which was close to the 1903 record of 4.30 inches of rain. Those 4+ inches compare to .12 as a normal October 8th rainfall. The rainfall for the first week of October has been 4.49 inches so far, in comparison with a normal number of 1.01 inches.
I'd call that worrying.
And what about you, what are you worried about today?

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