Weather whiplash: Summer lurches from drought to flood

Parts of northern Texas, mired in a drought labeled as extreme and exceptional, are flooding under torrential rain. In a drought.

Sound familiar? It should. The Dallas region is just the latest drought-suffering-but-flooded locale during a summer of extreme weather whiplash, likely goosed by human-caused climate change, scientists say. Parts of the world are lurching from drought to deluge.

The St. Louis area and 88% of Kentucky early in July were considered abnormally dry and then the skies opened up, the rain poured in biblical proportions, inch after inch, and deadly flooding devastated communities. The same thing happened in Yellowstone in June. Earlier this month, Death Valley, in a severe drought, got a near record amount of rainfall in one day, causing floods, and is still in a nasty drought.

China’s Yangtze River is drying up, a year after deadly flooding. China is baking under what is a record-long heat wave, already into its third month, with a preliminary report of an overnight low temperature only dipping down to 94.8 degrees (34.9 degrees Celsius) in the heavily populated city of Chongqing. And in western China flooding from a sudden downpour has killed more than a dozen people.

In the Horn of Africa in the midst of a devastating but oft-ignored famine and drought, nearby flash floods add to the humanitarian disaster unfolding. Europe, which suffered through unprecedented flooding last year, has baked with record heat compounded by a 500-year drought that is drying up rivers and threatening power supplies.

“So we really have had a lot of whiplash,” said Kentucky’s interim climatologist Megan Schargorodski. “It is really difficult to emotionally go through all of these extremes and get through it and figure out how to be resilient through the disaster...