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Synoptic And Climate Attributions Of The December 2015 Extreme Flooding In Missouri, Usa, Boniface Fosu, Simon Wang, Kathleen Pegion

Plants, Soils, and Climate Faculty Publications

Three days of extreme rainfall in late December 2015 in the middle of the Mississippi River led to severe flooding in Missouri. The meteorological context of this event was analyzed through synoptic diagnosis into the atmospheric circulation that contributed to the precipitation event’s severity. The midlatitude synoptic waves that induced the extreme precipitation and ensuing flooding were traced to the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO), which amplified the trans-Pacific Rossby wave train likely associated with the strong El Niño of December 2015. Though the near-historical El Niño contributed to a quasi-stationary trough over the western U.S. that induced the high precipitation …