Ruinous floods and constant heat: Scenes from a summer’s extreme weather

This season, an abundance of rain squeezed from moisture-laden skies and drought-hardened riverbeds baked beneath a sweltering sun. Despite the apparent contrast, the driving force was the same: record-setting, extreme heat. The summer of 2022 was hot, fueled by human-caused climate change.

Photographs of the season’s defining weather moments tell a story of a superheated atmosphere, wreaking havoc from Kentucky to Korea, Pakistan to Puerto Rico.

Yellowstone

Rivers swollen with rain and snowmelt flooded communities and roads near the entrance to Yellowstone in the middle of June. Up to four inches of rain poured down on the mountainous terrain. The deluge was accompanied by uncommon warmth that melted snow from the area’s peaks.

Kentucky

A duo of prolific rain events inundated swaths of the central United States, due to a stagnant pattern that saw waves of rich tropical moisture crash into a stalled-out cold front in the last week of July. Thirty-nine people were killed in the hills of eastern Kentucky as water raged through valley streams, the deadliest American flash flood disaster in decades that was unrelated to a tropical cyclone. One day earlier and a few hundred miles away, a record-breaking slug of rain slammed St. Louis, prompting widespread urban flooding.

Lake Mead

Much of the American West is seeing yet another dry year — part of a multi-decade drought. The result has been a dramatic drop in the water levels of America’s largest reservoir, located along the Colorado River near the Nevada-Arizona border. The shrinking Lake Mead set low-water records earlier this summer that led to the discovery of human remains and threatened power generation — a harrowing reminder of the hydrological concerns facing the populous region.

California

The West was overwhelmed by the most severe September heat wave in local history earlier this month as an unusually powerful ridge of high pressure suffocated the drought-stricken region. Record highs were set in Sacramento and San Jose, and hundreds of locations saw their hottest-ever September days.

Puerto Rico

Slow-moving Fiona, an exception to what has thus far been a quiet Atlantic hurricane season, blasted Puerto Rico on Sept. 18. Sustained winds up to 85 mph caused islandwide blackouts, and up to 32 inches of rain induced catastrophic flooding that inundated houses, destroyed roads and washed bridges downriver.

Pakistan

A monsoon season supercharged by tropical storm remnants dumped seasonal rainfall many times greater than normal across Pakistan over the summer. Rivers, already filled from glacial melt, expanded into massive lakes that submerged swaths of the world’s fifth-most-populous country, as flooding killed over 1,000 people.

China

An unwavering bout of dry heat gripped much of China in July and August, with rivers and lakes drying amid what may have been one of the most intense heat waves, globally, in recorded history. Impacts were concentrated in the country’s urbanized swaths, where record-crushing temperatures coincided with power shortages, drinking-water limits and agricultural woes at the hands of the drought.

Europe

Drought also gripped western and central Europe, as a summer of record-low precipitation and extreme temperatures dried riverbeds and lakes. Major waterways reached levels at their lowest point in many decades, while poor air quality and extreme heat — both certainly made more severe by the drought — threatened human health, likely leading to thousands of deaths.

United Kingdom

A hard-to-fathom day of extreme heat smashed temperature records across the United Kingdom on July 19. Britain hit 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) for the first time in recorded history.

South Korea

An immense rainstorm sent water pouring through the streets and subways, inundating basement apartments in Seoul in early August, as deep moisture pulled into a slow-moving cold front that incited endless rounds of thunderstorm activity over the Korean Peninsula. The record-setting rainfall killed at least nine people.

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