Climate scientists have been insisting that the seesaw between mega-droughts and mega-floods will become increasingly common as human emissions intensify the hydrological cycle. This is a far-cry from the once-in-a-century-drought and the once-in-a-century-flood that humanity had known earlier. A team of Duke University scientists had even quantified this.
Meteorologist and former hurricane hunter Dr Jeff Masters talks of the “departure of temperature from average for the moisture source regions of the globe’s four most extreme flooding disasters over the past 12 months.” The near-record sea surface temperatures that he mentions are in sync with what has been suggested by the Duke climatologists.
Moving from the flood to the earlier October 2010 drought, forest scientist Simon Lewis had remarked, "We know from simple on-the-ground knowledge that the 2010 drought was extreme, leading to record lows on some major rivers in the Amazon region and an upsurge in the number of forest fires. Preliminary analyses suggest that the 2010 drought was more widespread and severe than the 2005 event. The 2005 drought was identified as a 1-in-100 year type event."
The fact that weather conditions are becoming extreme, and that frequency of these extreme weather conditions too is becoming shorter is borne by the Brazilian examples.