Water Levels at New Mexico's Navajo Reservoir Surge to Seven-Year High

Newsweek reports, on NASA's figures and an AccuWeather meteorologist's comments, that back-to-back extreme rain events lifted Navajo Reservoir to its highest level since August 2019 and gave Lakes Mead and Powell a smaller boost. The figures are sourced and qualified, and the article reports the floods and evacuations. Its one gap is minor: it never says that warming makes heavy rainfall more frequent or more severe.

1. Leaves out the climate link

   Minor

   “The downpours also led to damaging floods and forced evacuations in portions of the Southwest.”

   Why this matters

   These words report damaging floods and evacuations after rainfall that S2 calls "back-to-back extreme rain events". Nothing in the sentence or anywhere else in the article connects that extreme rainfall to warming.

   The impression it gives

   A reader comes away seeing the floods only as a run of heavy weather, with El Niño as the one named climate driver, and with nothing to suggest that such downpours are becoming more likely.

   The context

   The documented record holds that warming has made heavy rainfall more frequent or more severe. No study attributing this particular event to warming was supplied, so the gap is general context only and not a serious omission.

   How we know

   • On the recordThat warming has made hot extremes, heavy rainfall, agricultural and ecological drought, fire weather and intense tropical cyclones more frequent or more severe.ipcc.ch (opens in a new tab)
   • Elsewhere in the article“back-to-back extreme rain events”
   • Checked against the whole articleIt never uses the words “warming”.