Seatttle Post-Intelligencer: …Is [flooding] becoming an annual exercise [in Western Washington]? And if so, what's to blame? Development? Logging? Climate change? The answer is all three, to some degree, in different places around the region, and at different times.Logging and development are prime suspects because dense forests intercept and slow down rainfall before it becomes a flood, while development plasters concrete and asphalt across marshy areas that once soaked up floodwaters. Meanwhile, climate change appears to be increasing the incidence of extraordinarily heavy rainstorms, scientists say.
…A groundbreaking 2007 article in the journal Stormwater that focused on Seattle's disastrous Dec. 14, 2006, floods, which drowned a woman in a Madison Valley basement, concluded that climate change is likely changing the very measures by which engineers must prepare communities for flooding.
Researchers at the UW's Climate Impacts Group are preparing to release results of a study still undergoing final reviews. But what can be said, said Philip Mote, a researcher in the group who serves as Washington state climatologist, is that climate change will have different effects in different places.
While it's easy to concentrate this week on widespread predictions that climate change will increase the number of extreme storms that dump huge amounts of rain, just look over the Cascades to Eastern Washington. There, Mote said, climate change already is lessening the amount of snow, and therefore the intensity of spring snowmelt floods.
"You can't just make a blanket statement that flooding will increase," Mote said. "You see this real patchwork. In some places it clearly goes up, and in some places it clearly goes down, and in some places it doesn't change."
Stillaguamish River (South Fork) flood at Granite Falls, Washington, 9 feet above flood stage, shot by Walter Siegmund, Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
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