A Changing Flood Recipe for Las Vegas

Las Vegas is an amazing city with lots of tourists year-round. Urbanization in this city rapidly increased and has a unique desert landscape. However, this city is vulnerable to flooding.

Researchers from DRI, the Clark County Regional Flood Control District, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Guangdong University of Technology looked at the shifting flood regime in Las Vegas in a paper that was released on January 6 in The Journal of Hydrometeorology. Their findings indicate that flood severity has risen since the middle of the 20th century, with an abrupt change taking place in the middle of the 1990s. The seasonality of floods has also changed as a result of climate change, with storms and the ensuing floods now happening more frequently in the winter as opposed to the historically stronger summer monsoon season.

The principal author of the new study and a hydrologist at DRI, Guo Yu, Ph.D., observed that something is happening when she examined the data for yearly flood maxima. “I wanted to know why this was happening.”

We need to stop pollution to prevent these disasters from occurring. Flooding and all of these disasters are being caused more frequently because of our pollution. Global warming is melting all of the sea ice and is threatening our ecosystems! Let’s stop before it is too late!

Author: Sri Nihal Tammana

Source: Desert Research Institute