Technologies
‘Weather Whiplash’ Could Be a Disturbing New Normal in a Weird, Warming World
After praying for rain for weeks, the US state that saw some of the year’s biggest wildfires in 2022 found itself soon suffering a deadly deluge.

This story is part of CNET Zero, a series that chronicles the impact of climate change and explores what’s being done about the problem.
I’ve lived in the high desert of the southwestern US most of my life, primarily in New Mexico and Colorado. In those four decades, I’ve never seen it as dry here as in 2022. In all that time, I’ve also never seen it as wet as this year.
In northern New Mexico, the year began with months of unseasonal heat, dryness and extreme wind that fueled the largest wildfire of the year in the lower 48 states. It burned through 340,000 acres of the Sangre de Cristo mountains and destroyed or damaged over a thousand homes and other structures.
Then, in the middle of June, the annual monsoon rains thankfully arrived to douse the fires. But they stayed a couple months longer and dumped nearly twice as much moisture as the previous year (or the year before that). In fact, we were still seeing some monsoon pattern precipitation several weeks later than normal.
There’s a term for this remarkably rapid turnaround in weather patterns that an increasing number of scientists have begun to use, both in the mainstream media and academic publications: weather whiplash.
«The huge shift in weather you experienced in New Mexico this summer is a perfect example,» Jennifer Francis, acting deputy director at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts tells me.
Francis is lead author on a paper published in September in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres on measuring weather whiplash events, which can be loosely defined as abrupt swings in weather conditions from one extreme to another.
At my home in the high desert this year, those swings translated into a Spring filled with smoke, heat, wind and the first emergency alert system notice I’d ever received warning me to get off the road immediately due to an approaching dust storm. By July the scene changed to one filled with rain, mud and more alerts, this time warning of flash flooding.
«Weather patterns are getting «stuck» in place more often, causing persistent heatwaves, drought, stormy periods, and even cold spells to happen more often,» Francis explained via email.
Her work shows all this stalled weather is connected to the rapid warming of the Arctic, which impacts the jet stream and in turn affects weather further south.
«These stuck weather patterns sometimes come to an abrupt end by changing abruptly to a very different pattern. This is weather whiplash.»
The phrase has been increasingly used in climate science circles for the past several years, but Francis points to a number of other instances of the phenomenon on full, sobering display in 2022 alone.
A July heatwave immediately followed exceptionally wet, cool weather in the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rockies in June. This turnaround was most dramatic in the Yellowstone region, where historic flooding in the first month of summer took many by surprise and claimed hundreds of homes but, somewhat miraculously, no lives. Shortly afterwards, temperatures soared several degrees above average and the region dried out.
Earlier in the year the inverse played out in Texas, where a spell of 67 consecutive dry, hot winter days in Dallas were followed by the city’s heaviest rains in 100 years, leading to flash flooding and a declaration of disaster by the state’s Governor.
Seasonal See-Saw
From late March until early June, much of northern New Mexico saw no measurable precipitation for a stretch of more than 70 days. Even for the current era, which many scientists suspect is the beginning of a megadrought in the southwestern US, that’s unusually dry.
This dryness, along with unseasonable heat and often extreme winds whipped up the embers of two controlled burns in the Santa Fe National Forest that had been secretly smoldering for months. Two wildfires sprang to life, eventually combining to form the 340,000-acre Calf Canyon-Hermit’s Peak fire complex.
The inferno burned homes, ranches, businesses and livestock, but didn’t claim any human lives – at least, not directly. Tens of thousands were evacuated from nearby cities and villages for weeks as fire devoured some of the state’s most rugged and beautiful terrain over the course of more than two months.
I visited some of the impacted communities to witness the total disruption and devastation while waiting to see if the flames would continue to push closer to my own community near Taos, less than 20 miles from the northwest edge of the fire.
For weeks it looked as though a nuclear bomb had been detonated just over the ridge of mountains near my home. A pyrocumulus mushroom cloud of smoke from the fire reached up into the atmosphere, a constant reminder of impending doom one valley over.
Sometimes the wind would shift and blow all that smoke our direction. It was possible to see this coming almost an hour in advance as a brown stream of smog would suddenly obscure the mountains. As it finally reached us, our eyes would water, our lungs would begin to burn and everything we wore or carried would take on the aroma of a barbecue. Minutes later, the sun would be blotted out on an otherwise sunny day. They were all sunny days back then.
My family would retreat inside every time the smoke came, of course. Then, in early June, another fire ignited on the opposite side of our community from where the megablaze was burning. We found ourselves surrounded. No matter which way the wind blew, there was a good chance it would blow smoke in our faces.
At this point our daughter was quarantined at home with COVID. We faced the very apocalyptic choice of keeping the windows open for better anti-viral ventilation or closing them to keep the smoke out. It wasn’t a particularly hard choice. We closed the windows. Inhaling smoke certainly isn’t great for getting over COVID, after all.
Then, in mid-June, both the weather and its impact took dramatic turns. The annual monsoon rains arrived right on time, and with an unusual intensity. Ironically, this is how New Mexico’s largest ever wildfire ended up claiming human lives after the flames had stopped spreading.
The burn scars left by wildfires absorb less moisture than healthy landscapes with plenty of vegetation, and that led to flash flooding. June and July in northern New Mexico saw repeated cycles of heavy rains, including a particularly heavy storm on July 21 that deluged the Calf Canyon-Hermit’s Peak burn scar. A flash flood tore through the Tecolote Canyon subdivision outside the city of Las Vegas, New Mexico, sweeping tons of mud, rocks, burned trees and even vehicles down the creek drainage. Tragically, three people were caught in the flood and died.
In the span of weeks, citizens in New Mexico went from fleeing fires to fleeing floods. Whiplash might describe the disjointed nature of this past summer, but it doesn’t begin to capture the anxiety brought on by this new realization that life in the 21st century might be about being ready for absolutely anything.
In June I was hauling water to my off-grid home in the back of a truck, 200 gallons at a time, and praying for the monsoon to arrive. The following month I was digging trenches to divert as much water as possible out of my driveway to lessen the persistent rain’s irritating habit of turning it into a muddy quagmire. This is to say nothing of the background anxiety created by nearby fires, floods and at least one epic wind event that took the roof off a neighbor’s house.
The Climate Connection
At least one group of researchers predicted this before it happened. Well, sort of.
On April 1, just five days before that massive fire in New Mexico sprang to life, a paper was published in the journal Science Advances titled «Climate change increases risk of extreme rainfall following wildfire in the western United States.»
The paper describes how scientists used climate models to predict that if global warming continues unabated, the western US will begin to see many more instances of extreme wildfires followed by extreme rainfall. They didn’t wait decades to see their predictions come true. It happened just weeks later.
«I would qualify what happened in New Mexico as extreme precipitation following extreme wildfires,» UCLA and National Center for Atmospheric Research climate scientist Daniel Swain, one of the authors of the study, told me. «Some of those fires were literally still burning pretty vigorously when the rain started. You really can’t get any whiplashier than that.»
Swain is one of a number of climate scientists digging into the data to determine what is creating this new, very 21st century sort of see-saw. One of the main factors, he says, is that the warming of the planet is accelerating the water, or hydrologic, cycle that moves moisture from surface water to the atmosphere and back again via precipitation.
«You actually get an exponential increase in the water-vapor-holding capacity of the atmosphere,» he explains.
Basically, for every degree centigrade of warming, the atmosphere can hold 7% more moisture. These increases compound over time, sort of like interest in a bank account, which provides the exponential acceleration of extreme rainfall events that are more frequent and more intense.
Swain describes our atmosphere as a sponge that grows ever larger as it warms, periodically soaking up potentially larger amounts of moisture and then dumping it all at once on some unfortunate locale. But this expanding sponge is also exacerbating dryness in places where it extracts an increasing amount of water out of the landscape.
This means drier dry periods and wetter precipitation events, sometimes back-to-back. Whiplash.
Swain cautions that it’s too soon to know how much of the weather whiplash experienced in northern New Mexico this year can truly be blamed on climate change versus just basic bad luck and the natural variation and randomness that we’d see in our weather patterns even without global warming.
Climate scientists have developed so-called «weather attribution» models that quantify the effects of climate change directly on specific weather events like what was experienced this year in New Mexico, but the process can take several months or longer.
Weirder than Warming
When I first started covering climate two decades ago, a climatologist told me the phrase «global warming» wouldn’t fully describe what was going to happen to our environment and that it would be more like «global weirding.»
That phrase never caught on, but I’m starting to think weather whiplash might be its appropriate successor.
For decades now, talk about the warming climate has focused on increasing temperatures, but usually these are increasing average temperatures. However, we don’t experience climate in the aggregate. We live it day-to-day as weather that is increasingly extreme.
«If you get 20 inches of rainfall distributed as half an inch a day for 40 days it’s a very different picture than getting 20 inches of rainfall because it rains 10 inches one day and 10 inches the next,» Swain suggests. «The average might be the same, but you’re living in a completely different world.»
In other words, our experience of climate change can’t be fully captured by talking about how much temperatures or sea levels or rainfall are rising. It’s the extremes and the weirdness and the chaotic swings from one state to another that tell the real story and inflict the most trauma.
At the point this summer when wildfires were burning on both sides of our community I had a weird flashback to my childhood. One of my favorite things to read as a kid in the previous century was Choose Your Own Adventure books. They had this intoxicating ability to provide both an escape and agency at the same time.
It feels like we could use a little more of both things right now. Life today has the feel of all the potential adventures in those books happening back-to-back and often simultaneously. The only choice is to be ready for anything.
Technologies
Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Sunday, June 8
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 8.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.
Today’s NYT Mini Crossword isn’t too tough, but 1-Across might make you think of the sky, and that’s not the direction you need to go. Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Read on. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.
The Mini Crossword is just one of many games in the Times’ games collection. If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.
Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword
Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.
Mini across clues and answers
1A clue: Org. with shooting stars
Answer: NBA
4A clue: Buildings with weather vanes, stereotypically
Answer: BARNS
6A clue: Swiss watch brand
Answer: OMEGA
7A clue: What Santa, Gandalf and Dumbledore each have
Answer: BEARD
8A clue: Pie in the ___
Answer: SKY
Mini down clues and answers
1D clue: «I’m bad with ___» (party excuse)
Answer: NAMES
2D clue: Start of a billiards game
Answer: BREAK
3D clue: Seeing red
Answer: ANGRY
4D clue: Timothée’s role in «A Complete Unknown»
Answer: BOB
5D clue: Feeling blue
Answer: SAD
How to play more Mini Crosswords
The New York Times Games section offers a large number of online games, but only some of them are free for all to play. You can play the current day’s Mini Crossword for free, but you’ll need a subscription to the Times Games section to play older puzzles from the archives.
Technologies
Today’s NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for June 8, #258
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, No. 258, for June 8.

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.
Today’s Connections: Sports Edition isn’t too tough, but let’s hope you know the résumé of a certain NBA player to get the blue group. Read on for hints and the answers.
Connections: Sports Edition is out of beta now, making its debut on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 9. That’s a sign that the game has earned enough loyal players that The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by the Times, will continue to publish it. It doesn’t show up in the NYT Games app but now appears in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can continue to play it free online.
Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta
Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups
Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.
Yellow group hint: Let’s go at it.
Green group hint: Signal-callers.
Blue group hint: Hoops star’s teams.
Purple group hint: Great barbecue town.
Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups
Yellow group: Competition.
Green group: Names of NFL QBs.
Blue group: Teams Tyrese Haliburton has played for.
Purple group: Kansas City ____.
Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words
What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?
The yellow words in today’s Connections
The theme is competition. The four answers are bout, contest, event and match.
The green words in today’s Connections
The theme is names of NFL QBs. The four answers are Baker, Bo, Dak and Tua.
The blue words in today’s Connections
The theme is teams Tyrese Haliburton has played for. The four answers are Iowa State, Kings, Pacers and USA.
The purple words in today’s Connections
The theme is Kansas City ____. The four answers are Chiefs, Current, Monarchs and Royals.
Technologies
Today’s NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for June 8, #728
Here are some hints and the answers for Connections for June 8, #728.

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.
Today’s NYT Connections puzzle could be tricky. The purple category is one of those «sounds like» groups, that can be really tough to figure out. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers.
The Times now has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.
Read more: Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every Time
Hints for today’s Connections groups
Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group, to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.
Yellow group hint: Keep at it.
Green group hint: Think Wall Street animals.
Blue group hint: Online encyclopedia subheads.
Purple group hint: $$$.
Answers for today’s Connections groups
Yellow group: Persist.
Green group: Animal metaphors in economics.
Blue group: Sidebar info on a person’s Wikipedia page.
Purple group: Homophones of slang for money.
Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words
What are today’s Connections answers?
The yellow words in today’s Connections
The theme is persist. The four answers are hold, last, stand and stay.
The green words in today’s Connections
The theme is animal metaphors in economics. The four answers are bear, bull, dove and hawk.
The blue words in today’s Connections
The theme is sidebar info on a person’s Wikipedia page. The four answers are born, education, occupation and spouse.
The purple words in today’s Connections
The theme is homophones of slang for money. The four answers are bred, cache, doe and lute.
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