[zachrose]

I was on a road trip throughout a lot of different parts of America last month. A park ranger in Big Bend told me that a tributary creek of the Rio Grande was a hundred feet wide, when normally you can just jump over it. A lakeside highway rest area in North Carolina was flooded up to a permanently mounted bench and trash can.

[amvalo]

Huh? Big bend is nowhere near sea level..

[moate]

Rising temperatures melting glacial/mountain ice more dramatically contributing to river water carry? I'm not saying that's specifically the case, just throwing out a possible hypothesis. Plenty of others exist (bad rainy season, tributary re-routing due to industry, removal of forested areas that would have previously soaked up water, etc).

Could be a global warming thing, could be a seasonal thing, could be anything really.

[QuarterReptile]

As a general rule, higher temperatures lead to atrophied snowmelt rivers because there's not as much accumulation. That's one of the contributing factors for water problems in a lot of Western (U.S.) areas.

[moate]

Good point, but OP didn't mention if this was an isolated incident (the hot summer that burns off more cap snow which will never get replenished) or a sustained thing (this used to be a 4 foot stream, but for the last 5 years it's been 100 feet wide instead). Who knows what's actually going on in this story.

I'm not saying it's anything one way or the other since this is a hyper-empirical piece of data to be working off of. Based on context I'm assuming OP meant to imply that this is a sign of rising water levels, but I was just posting some alternate theories.

[zachrose]

Yes, hyper-empirical is exactly right. I totally don't know what caused the bigger creek in Big Bend or how that relates to the larger climate. I was hoping Hacker News would chime in with exactly this kind of analysis.