For those interested, here is the link to the AI-generated article: www.forwardpathway.us/extreme-weat...

-"So, like, remember that crazy St. Louis flood back in July 2022? TBH, it was wild. Everyone was saying it was a “1-in-1,000-year” event. Can’t even imagine dealing with that. But hold up, fam. Turns out, maybe it wasn’t that extra."

-"It’s not just random chance, fam. Climate change is the ultimate puppeteer, pulling the strings on our weather patterns, and the results are, well, not cute."

Here are some of my favorite highlights:

-"The data’s just not thicc enough."

-"If we’re building for a “1-in-1,000-year” storm when it could be more frequent, that’s a major vibe check fail."

-"Sparse data is a major vibe kill."

I love this synopsis of our paper 😆

The paper can be found here: journals.ametsoc.org/view/journal...

Finally, this project from my postdoc facilitated a pivot in terms of my research interests that culminated in me landing my current job at CIRES/CU Boulder working with NOAA PSL on high-resolution modeling for modernizing estimates of probable maximum precipitation! (end)

This new approach also included enough historical and modern/future data to estimate that the rainfall amount from this extreme event is about 2-4 times more likely to occur now and in the future compared to the preceding ~1,000 years. (5/6)

This new “blended dataset” allowed me to refine the estimate of the storm’s rainfall over St. Louis and Kentucky to a ~1-in-530-year and ~1-in-280-year event, respectively, and reduced the uncertainty bars in this calculation by ~24-94% (4/6)

I sought to improve the assessment of this storm by developing a new method that combined over a century of rainfall observations from dozens of rain gauges with 1,250 years of climate model simulations spanning 850 to 2100 CE, thus greatly lengthening the data record. (3/6)

This event was declared a 1-in-1,000-year event and caused quite a stir in the media, but a deeper look into the historical rainfall data revealed HUGE uncertainty bars on making such a declaration - mainly because it was made using only a few decades of observations (2/6)

Let me know if you'd like to see the same report for a different location