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

Zelle App Is Gone. Use These Alternatives to Send Money Digitally

You still have lots of free ways to send money to friends and family electronically.

If Zelle has been your go-to app for sending money digitally, it’s time to find a new method. The digital payment app shut down on April 1.

That doesn’t mean you can’t use Zelle altogether, however. Zelle has only discontinued its standalone app. You can still send money using Zelle if your bank belongs to the Zelle network. You’ll just need to do it through your bank’s app or website. You also have other services to choose from. Here’s what you need to know about this change and your options moving forward.

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Why the Zelle app is shutting down

When Zelle launched in 2017, only about 60 US financial institutions offered the service by the end of that year. Today, that number exceeds 2,200. As a result, less than 2% of Zelle transactions occur through the standalone app. Zelle has been phasing out the ability to make transactions on its mobile app since October 2024.

«Today, the vast majority of people using Zelle to send money use it through their financial institution’s mobile app or online banking experience, and we believe this is the best place for Zelle transactions to occur,» Zelle said in an October 2024 press release.

In December, Zelle was in the spotlight when the Consumer Financial Protected Bureau sued the company and three of the largest US banks for failing to protect consumers from widespread fraud on the peer-to-peer payment network. The lawsuit has since been dropped.

Other ways to send money digitally

You can still use Zelle through your bank’s app or website if it belongs to the Zelle network. You can also switch to another digital payment app, such as:

Apple Wallet
Cash App
PayPal
Venmo

Take some basic precautions when using Zelle or any other digital payment service. These apps are a frequent target for scammers, and Chase Bank has started blocking some Zelle payments it believes could be fraudulent. Only send money to people you know and trust, and watch for red flags like an urgent message claiming to be from your bank or an online ad for concert tickets that seem impossibly cheap.

Technologies

Marvel Rivals Season 2 Starts Next Week, Devs Drop Big News

Emma Frost and Ultron are joining the Rivals roster in season 2, and developers are upping the pace to one new hero per month starting with season 3.

After surviving the endless night in New York City with the Fantastic Four, Marvel Rivals players are getting invited to the shores of Krakoa for the start of season 2 on April 11. The game dropped the first trailer for the new season, giving us our first official look at the new heroes, and a developer vision video dropped major news about the future of hero releases.

The trailer features the former foe and sometimes-leader of the X-Men, Emma Frost, inviting people from across Rivals’ various timelines to the mutant nation of Krakoa, where everyone gets dressed up for a fancy gala — even Wolverine puts on a white tux. The event, however, is unceremoniously interrupted when Ultron shows up preaching extermination.

We also got a look at some of the cosmetics in season 2, though it’s unclear which are from the shop and which might be in the battle pass. In addition to the dressed-up Wolverine, we also got looks at Magik and Psylocke in the traditional X-Men blue and yellow. Nonmutant guests are also getting in on the fun, with fancy attire for heroes like Cap, Widow and Luna Snow.

New Heroes and balance changes in Marvel Rivals Season 2

Emma Frost joins the roster as a Vanguard. We don’t have detailed information about her abilities yet but expect that information to drop ahead of next week’s season launch. Ultron is coming in the season 2.5 update, which should be in late May.

Some team-ups are changing in season 2, including three new team-up abilities that were previewed in the newest developer vision video.

Emma Frost allows Magneto and Psylocke to create illusions of themselves.
Doctor Strange teams up with Scarlet Witch allowing her to use small portals to seemingly increase her damage output via a rapid-shooting alternate fire.
Cap finally teams up with Bucky, allowing the Winter Soldier to leap to allies.

A few existing team-ups are getting adjustments, with Psylocke, Winter Soldier and Doctor Strange being removed from older team-ups in favor of new ones, and Namor moving from working with Luna’s anchor to Hulk’s to empower his ultimate with gamma energy. Two team-ups are being removed entirely: Magneto can no longer team up with Scarlet Witch, and Thor is no longer anchoring Cap and Storm.

The developers vaguely teased other balance changes, including buffs to Peni, Mister Fantastic and Moon Knight, with Strange trading offensive pressure for more survivability and Rocket getting more utility while Loki and Adam Warlock receive nerfs to their Regeneration Domain and Soul Bond abilities.

Future seasons will be shorter, which means more new heroes

One of the most surprising moments in the developer video was the announcement that, beginning with season 3, seasons will be two months long instead of roughly three. There has been a lot of discussion online about whether Rivals’ pace of new heroes (about eight per year based on three-month seasons) was sustainable. Well, apparently the Rivals devs took that personally and are cranking up that pace to a new hero every month, meaning 12 new heroes per year.

This feels borderline ludicrous compared with other hero shooters that average about three new heroes per year, or even MOBAs like League of Legends, which has averaged about four new champions per year over the past five years. Rivals benefits from having an overflowing stable of Marvel characters to pull from rather than inventing their own hero concepts, and compared with Overwatch, the developers seem less worried about mechanical overlap in their heroes, as seen with many support ultimates. Still, a new hero every month feels unheard of for a hero shooter.

New Krakoa map and competitive changes

A new Krakoa-themed domination map is being added in season 2, and Yggsgard: Royal Palace (domination) and Tokyo 2099: Shin-Shibuya (convergence) will rotate out of the map pool for ranked modes, though they’ll still be available in quick play and custom games.

The threshold for competitive picks and bans, which currently only happen in diamond-ranked lobbies, will be lowered to gold 3. Players in Eternity or One Above All ranks will only be able to duo queue, instead of queuing with larger groups — a measure that’s likely intended to keep high-level teams from stomping lobbies.

Speaking of ranks, season 2 will drop everyone by 9 divisions, which is equal to 3 ranks. That means players in Eternity will drop to diamond, and any players at platinum 3 or below will start their climb from bronze 3 again. (AGAIN… AGAIN.)

Rivals developers also announced that individual player performance will be weighted higher when determining competitive progress after a match, meaning if your stats outperform your team’s, you’ll earn more for winning and drop less for losing. This change can help elevate smurfs and other high-skill players in lower-ranked lobbies by getting them into their appropriate ranks faster. However, it can also lead to players stat-farming, instead of playing in a way that is most effective for winning games. Overall, given that Rivals doesn’t use any sort of competitive placement matches, this should be a net positive for the game.

Other announcements

Rivals is adding new skin recolors to certain hero skins and (finally) giving players the option to gift costumes to their friends so they can surprise someone for their birthday, which you definitely did not forget about.

Missions are changing a bit, with the addition of weekly missions and a redistribution of where battle-pass-progressing chrono tokens are earned. The devs framed this as creating a «smoother expectation» of how to earn chrono tokens, but the surface-level description sounds like they’re just making it harder to earn battle pass progress over the season by tucking away more progress under missions with shorter time limits.

The developer vision update also gave us our first look at the competitive distribution, showing how many Rivals players are in each tier as of season 1.5.

The Hellfire Gala trailer says season 2 will start on April 11. While it doesn’t give a specific start time, expect the between-seasons maintenance to finish sometime in the middle of the night in the US.

For more on Marvel Rivals, check out which heroes and roles you should play and how to get free skins.

Technologies

Nintendo Switch 2 vs. Switch 1: Every Detail Compared

The Nintendo Switch 2’s official specs aren’t too different, but the new console has a lot of upgrades on the original Switch.

The Nintendo Switch 2 may look like its predecessor, but there’s been a lot of changes to its features and under the hood. The new console has «10x the graphics performance» compared to the original Switch, says Nvidia, which built the custom processor powering the Switch 2.

The Switch 2, with a release date on June 5, is priced at $450 alone or $500 in a bundle with Mario Kart World, the headliner of the console’s launch games. Here’s all the info on how to preorder the Switch 2.

Note that we’re mostly comparing the Switch 2 to the original Switch 1 released in March 2017, because looping in the Switch Lite and Switch OLED gets complicated.

Design

Broadly, the Switch 2 is a larger version of its predecessor, with everything looking slightly inflated: bigger footprint, bigger screen, bigger Joy-Cons.

Original Switch: The original Switch, with Joy-Cons slotted into the side rails, is a little over 9.4 inches wide, 4 inches tall, a little over half an inch thick and weighs about 10.5 ounces (297 grams). The Joy-Cons slide into place from the top of the device’s sides, while a thin wedge of plastic pops out of the back of the console to serve as a kickstand.

The Switch also came with a dock, which the console could slot into to for recharging and outputting to a TV or large display via HDMI port.

Switch 2: The new Switch 2 is bigger in every way, but it has the same overall shape and layout as the original. The new Joy-Cons will indeed be held in place on the console magnetically, and connect to the console via pins. The new console also sports a wide U-shaped kickstand that spans almost its entire rear width, which can be moved around to prop up the Switch 2 at a variety of angles. Nintendo says the console has more powerful speakers, which we’re looking forward to testing.

The Switch 2’s dock is largely similar in function though it has rounded edges and an internal fan to cool down the console during long game sessions. More importantly, it can output games in 4K to TVs, but only for select games.

Joy-Cons

The Joy-Cons were a marvel when they arrived on the first Switch, and while they’re functionally similar in its successor, there have been upgrades in the Switch 2’s controllers.

Original Switch: The Switch Joy-Cons are simple but powerful controllers that slid on and off the console via plastic rails, connecting and recharging via pins on the side. Detach and they become their own micro-controllers, with little shoulder buttons to boot.

Switch 2: The new console’s Joy-Cons are larger to fit the Switch 2, and lock into the side of the console via powerful magnets — there are small inward-facing buttons to the side of ZR and ZL to detach the controllers from the console. The larger-size Joy-Cons have longer L and R outside shoulder buttons, as well as much wider SL and SR internal shoulder buttons, which are accessible when detached from the console.

And yes, you can use the Switch 2 Joy-Cons as mice by placing their inner edges flat on a surface. During the Nintendo Direct, we saw it being used to control active action games like the wheelchair basketball-simulating DragXDrive and strategy games like Civilization VII.

Display size

Original Switch: The original Switch has a 6.2-inch LCD screen with 1,280×720-pixel resolution, which was reasonably impressive at launch in 2017 but has been outclassed by newer handhelds with sharper displays. The Switch OLED upgraded this with a larger 7-inch display showing deeper blacks and colors, but no upgrade in resolution. The Switch Lite has a 5.5-inch LCD screen.

Switch 2: Unsurprisingly, the Switch 2’s larger size means a larger display. The new console has a 7.9-inch 1080p LCD screen that can get up to 120Hz refresh rate in handheld mode, or up to 4K when docked and outputting to a TV.

Why no OLED display? Possibly to save on costs… or possibly to give Nintendo room to release a Switch 2 OLED version down the line.

CPU/GPU

Original Switch: The original Switch runs on an Nvidia custom Tegra X1 processor split into four ARM Cortex A57 CPU cores, and according to Hackaday, there are four extra A53 cores that aren’t used.

Switch 2: Once again, Nintendo hasn’t released any official info on the Switch 2’s specs, even after the Nintendo Direct reveal stream — and they most the company reveals is that it has a «custom processor made by Nvidia» on the Switch 2’s official specs page. Nvidia confirmed it also has a custom GPU, claiming that the new console has «10x the graphics performance» of the Switch 1, and the custom processor’s AI-powered features include Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), face tracking and background removal for video chat and real-time ray tracing.

We do still have more supposed details from previous leaks. Months ago on X (formerly Twitter), leaker Zuby_Tech posted that the Switch 2’s CPU will be an eight-core Arm Cortex A78C. They also suggested that the GPU will be an Nvidia T239 Ampere, aligning with years of similar rumors reported on by Eurogamer and others about the custom chip, which derives from Nvidia’s Tegra line of chips for smartphones and mobile devices.

RAM and storage

Original Switch. The Switch has 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 32GB of onboard storage, expandable up to 2TB via microSD cards in the slot beneath the kickstand.

Switch 2: Even after the reveal stream, Nintendo didn’t release official specs for RAM. Leaker Zuby_Tech posted on X back in September suggesting the Switch 2 will have 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 256GB of onboard storage. That leak also suggested the new console will have two internal fans, up from the single one in the original Switch.

Nintendo did confirm that the new console will have 256GB of onboard storage, which can be expanded with special microSD Express cards — sorry, your old Switch-compatible microSD cards won’t work on the Switch 2.

Battery life

Original Switch: The original Switch packs a 4,310-mAh battery, which gives between 4.5 and 9 hours of battery life depending on screen brightness and other factors.

Switch 2: Though Nintendo didn’t release details on the Switch 2’s capacity in the reveal stream, the company does list specs on its website, showing it packs a 5,220mAh battery. While that’s notably larger than the one in its predecessor, Nintendo estimates this will only get players between an estimated 2 and 6.5 hours, depending on games played.

Ports

Original Switch: The first Switch sports a single USB-C port out the bottom, a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top and Wi-Fi 5 plus Bluetooth 4.1 connectivity. On the top is a slot at the top for Switch game cartridges as well as the microSD slot beneath the kickstand on the rear of the console.

Switch 2: The Switch 2 retains the original’s USB-C port on the bottom and 3.5mm jack on the top while adding another USB-C port topside, and now we know what it’s for: to connect with accessories like the Nintendo Switch Camera, a webcam-like camera on a stand to let you do Nintendo’s version of FaceTiming while you play games with your friends.

Nintendo hasn’t clarified the console’s connectivity options, and rumors are scarce on the subject.

As for cartridges, Switch 2 will play some original Switch games in physical versions. The cartridge slot is to the right of the headphone jack in the above image, which is where the slot is on the original Switch. You can tell game cartridges from the two console generations apart by color: ones for the new Switch 2 are red, while older Switch 1 games are black.