If it seemed like Louisiana had more than its fair share of bad weather in 2016, it did. Last year was the most destructive year in the state in more than a decade, according to WAFB Chief Meteorologist Jay Grymes.
In a speech today to the Baton Rouge Rotary Club, Grymes recounted the string of successive weather events that plagued the state last year. They included: January’s river flooding, which resulted in the third opening in a decade of the Bonnet Carre Spillway; February’s multiple tornado outbreaks, one of the largest ever recorded in the state; March’s record flood, which devastated parts of north Louisiana; summer temperatures that were among the hottest on record; the historic August flood, which dumped as much as 30 inches of rain on some areas of the Capital Region in just two days; and, finally, a fall drought, which peaked in November.
Despite the weather extremes, Grymes resisted attributing the disasters to global warming or climate change, though he says 2016 will go down on record as the world’s warmest year ever. Still, he says even if the threats of climate change are overstated, “just modest changes in the climate could have huge impacts on the state.”
Grimes presented statistical evidence showing that rainfall has increased 10% in Louisiana over the past 100 years, but he pointed out that there was tremendous variability in the amount of rain the state receives from year to year.
In the immediate future, however, the outlook calls for a drier than normal winter. There’s a 40% chance rainfall will be below normal over the next three months, and an almost certainty that temperatures will be above average.
“So we will have reduced heating requirements, and it isn’t going to be extremely wet,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean there won’t be any freezes or floods. These are three-month climate outlooks, not weather forecasts.”
As for the state’s tropical weather outlook, Grymes presented data showing that Louisiana has taken more hits from tropical weather systems than any other state. Only a handful of times over the past century has Louisiana gone four years without a direct hit. He also pointed out that it has just completed the fourth year in such a cycle, suggesting that the state won’t be so lucky in 2017.
That said, Grymes believes the August flood should have been classified as a tropical weather system, even though it couldn’t qualify as a named storm because it didn’t have high enough wind speeds.
“It was a terrible disaster,” he says. “And it largely went uncovered by the national media because it didn’t have a name.”
—Stephanie Riegel
