This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Winter storm and flood alerts continue this week for millions of Americans following a weekend of flash floods in states such as Pennsylvania and Illinois, where many residents were forced to evacuate their homes as they took on water. It’s the third weekend this month when large swaths of the country have been doused with extreme wintry conditions—a trend that’s becoming increasingly more likely because of climate change, recent analyses show.
In northeastern Illinois, unseasonably warm temperatures destabilized a pileup of ice on the Kankakee River and unleashed major flooding, prompting evacuations of about 200 homes. “There’s always ice backups this time of year, but I’ve never seen it this bad,” one resident told a local news station.
Several residents in the Pittsburgh metro area were also forced to evacuate on Sunday—one person by ladder—after the state saw record rainfall as a coastal storm drenched much of the Northeast. At one point, some 15 million Americans in the region were under flood watch that day, with another eight million facing winter and snow alerts, ABC News reported.
Arkansas residents also found themselves inundated by flash floods after record-high water levels on the Cache River led to a levee failure Sunday evening. Winter storms over the prior weekend brought freezing rain to northern and central parts of the state, and the National Weather Service said the river was at its highest water levels in six years.
The weekend floods top off a month that has been especially active with winter storms, which recent reports suggest are being driven largely by human-caused climate change.
ClimaMeter, an international consortium of climate scientists, released a rapid attribution analysis last week that examined the…
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