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Floods, Fire, Landslides, and Drought: The Guardian’s “Weather Crisis 2010”
August 16, 2010 By Schuyler Null
From the Guardian’s DataBlog comes an excellent overview of some of the extreme weather affecting the globe this summer, from the devastating floods in Pakistan which have inflicted “huge losses” to crops and exacerbated an already tenuous security situation, to the wildfires in Russia which have smothered the capital in dangerous smog and crippled domestic wheat supplies.
“Global temperatures in the first half of the year were the hottest since records began more than a century ago,” writes author and graphic artist Mark McCormick.
The orange areas of the map represent high pressure systems and the blue, low pressure systems, which as explained by Peter Stott of the Met Office, are important indicators of the rare climatic conditions that caused this summer’s abnormal conditions across Eurasia.
The flooding in Pakistan has garnered the most international attention, having now affected more people than the 2004 tsunami, 2010 Haiti earthquake, and 2005 Kashmir earthquake combined. Other highlighted areas of the map include flooding in Poland and Germany, drought in England, mudslides in Latin and South America, record-breaking drought and hunger in West Africa, and flooding and landslides in China, which recently pushed the world’s largest hydroelectric dam to its limit and have now been blamed for more than 1,000 deaths.
Although it does a good job highlighting the frequency and severity of extreme weather events this summer, it’s important to note that the map only covers events in July and August. That leaves out the “1000-year” floods in Tennessee this May as well as the heavy snowfall seen in the Northeast United States and the winter of “white death” in Mongolia earlier this year, which also severely disrupted local and national infrastructure as well as a great many people’s livelihoods.
Sources: Agence France-Presse, BBC, Guardian, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, New York Times, Telegraph, UN Dispatch.
Image Credit: “Weather Crisis 2010” by Mark McCormick, courtesy of Scribd user smfrogers and The Guardian.
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