Extreme events are occurrences of unusually severe weather or climate conditions that can cause devastating impacts on communities and agricultural and natural ecosystems. Weather-related extreme events are often short-lived and include heat waves, freezes, heavy downpours, tornadoes, tropical cyclones and floods. Climate-related extreme events either persist longer than weather events or emerge from the accumulation of weather or climate events that persist over a longer period of time. Examples include drought resulting from long periods of below-normal precipitation or wildfire outbreaks when a prolonged dry, warm period follows an abnormally wet and productive growing season.This type of probabilistic approach is applied in extreme event attribution to determine whether global warming is driving changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme events.
The second approach is more widely applied by the climate adaptation community and uses impact-related thresholds to determine if an event is extreme, and to inform adaptive solutions. A common example here is the number of consecutive days over 100˚F, which can be used to quantify heat waves. There has been a substantial increase in most measures of Atlantic hurricane activity since the early 1980s, the period during which high quality satellite data are available. These include measures of intensity, frequency, and duration as well as the number of strongest (Category 4 and 5) storms.
The recent increases in activity are linked, in part, to higher sea surface temperatures in the region that Atlantic hurricanes form in and move through. Numerous factors have been shown to influence these local sea surface temperatures, including natural variability, human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gasses, and particulate pollution. Tornadoes are outgrowths of powerful thunderstorms that appear as rotating, funnel-shaped clouds. They extend from a thunderstorm to the ground with violent winds that average 30 miles per hour. Also, they can vary in speed dramatically from being stationary to 70 miles per hour. With a loud roar that sounds similar to a freight train, tornadoes in the United States typically are 500 feet across and travel on the ground for five miles.
Every state is at some risk from tornadoes and the severe storms that produce them. These same destructive storms also cause strong gusts of wind, lightning strikes, and flash floods. In my life, I haven’t experienced much extreme weather, the only thing that i’ve really experienced is extreme cold. Every year, we tend to have a lot of snow days and really cold school days. We also get a lot of ice on the road which is the reason for the snow days. Blizzards can also lead to power outages. Many people who live in big cities and towns lose power due to these heavy amounts of snow, wind, and freezing air.