And most of it fell in the span of 48 hours. But the brightest grid cell, located just near Enoch where the flooding was the worst, illustrates an isolated dump of rainfall amounting to 600% of normal for that one spot.
The blue and purple hues in grid cells across the map show areas with 200 to 400% higher-than-normal precipitation during the 30-day period leading up to August 3, 2021. Paul Monroe, the General Manager of the CICWCD, shared a map of part of Iron County from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration where this pattern is plain to see. More: Utah youth looking for answers on climate change question national climate reporter
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More specifically, while heavy, monsoon rains are a natural, long-standing feature of desert landscapes like ours, the intensity and geographical specificity of recent storm events is a relatively new pattern that scientists have - just last week in the newly-released IPCC report - definitively linked to the influences of human-caused climate change (please feel free to email me with any questions about that).
Luckily, for clarity's sake, we have a panel of global experts who recently determined that, yes, events like this are a result of climate change. For me, it’s just a lot of rain and we filled a lot of sandbags." Whether you call that climate change or not, I’ll leave that to somebody else to determine. The quantity of rain and the frequency in late July and the first part of August, that two-week period, we had more rain than I’ve ever experienced here before.
"Many other residents have said the same thing. “July had lots of rain, more than I’ve ever experienced in my 53 years here," said Rob Dotson, Enoch City Manager. The problem with intense storms like the ones that have peppered southern Utah with dramatic flooding in recent weeks is that they dump a huge amount of rain in a very isolated area over a short period of time, meaning that most of the moisture just ends up flowing downhill, or into living rooms, instead of sinking into the soil where it can be soaked up by plants or drip down into the aquifer. More: The Water Tap: Cedar Valley to adopt new groundwater management plan that includes cuts So the district is also pursuing their Pine Valley Water Supply project to pump groundwater to Cedar City from Beaver County's Pine Valley and, earlier this year, the state engineer imposed a schedule for mandatory cuts to Cedar City Valley's over-allocated water rights, set to take effect in 2035. But that process is slow and the solution will not be enough to meet Iron County's growing needs. The Central Iron County Water Conservancy District (CICWCD) has constructed a system to facilitate aquifer recharge by funneling stormwater to various locations with a porous geological base where it can pool and then gradually percolate underground. More: The Water Tap: An overdrawn aquifer is causing Cedar Valley to sink, but efforts to study it have stalled This is mixed news for Cedar City Valley, which has been dealing with a depleted aquifer - a natural geological feature that stores water underground - due to pumped withdrawals exceeding the volume of water that filters back underground each year. The imbalance precipitates a variety of problems, including surface subsidence at spots across the valley where the ground above the dropping aquifer has fissured and sunk. “The benefits from flooding to groundwater recharge really depend on whether there’s a way for the water to get into the ground,” said Lauren Foster, a Colorado-based hydrologist who has studied the influence of climate change on western water supplies.
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