Hawaii is swimming in floodwaters after back-to-back storms dropped some of the heaviest rainfall the state has seen in at least 20 years. At the same time, a staggering heat wave is scorching the western U.S., toppling more than 1,500 daily high temperature records.
The two events have unfolded thousands of miles apart — but one expert says they could be linked through increasingly common extreme weather phenomena.
The storms that soaked Hawaii pumped water into an atmospheric river streaming eastward to North America. The warm, moist air in the western U.S. may have intensified the heat that followed, says Daniel Swain, a leading climate scientist at the California Institute for Water Resources and a research partner at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Swain is known for his research on climate change and extreme weather events. Much of his work focuses on how events like floods, fires and heat waves are changing as global temperatures rise.
