A mixture of mostly natural, fleeting forces with some connections to long-term climate change combined to create the recent extensive flooding in the Yellowstone region, scientists say.
Things looked good. The drought wasn’t quite busted — in fact Thursday’s national drought monitor still puts 84% of Montana under unusually dry or full-fledged drought conditions — but it was better. Then came too much of a moist thing. Heavy rains poured in thanks to a water-laden atmosphere turbocharged by warmer than normal Pacific water. And when it poured, it melted. The equivalent of nine inches of rain flowed down Montana mountain slopes in some places.
One gage on the Stillwater River near Absarokee, where Osborne lives, normally flows at 7,000 feet per second during a moderate flood and races at 12,400 feet per second in a 100-year flood, he said. A once-in-500-year flood would mean water raging at 14,400 feet per second. Preliminary numbers show that on Monday, it crested at 23,700 feet per second, the equivalent of stacking three moderate floods on top of each other, according to Osborne.
Over the long-term, climate change is reducing snowpack in the West, according to Guillaume Mauger, a research scientist at the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group.But the spring didn’t follow that long-term pattern. La Nina may have played a role in several ways. While there have been La Ninas like this one throughout the past “we’ve never seen in human history persistent La Nina events with global temperatures this warm before. That is a unique combination,” Swain said. “We already know that La Nina increases the risk of floods in some places. It increases the amount of active weather in some places. And then you have warmer oceans and a warmer atmosphere that can supercharge those.
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