This week's question comes from Morning Brief reader Jean, who asks, "Is there an international body that keeps records of the number of serious floods that occur all over the world? News media reports bad damage so often but I don't know if this means more floods or just more reporting."

Meteorologist Jonathan Belles: Record-keeping is very important to meteorology. Scientists are trying to build our current records and also our ancient records as best we can, so that we can accurately answer questions like, “Are floods becoming more frequent?”

We need records to figure out if something is the same trend that's been happening for 10 or 20 years. Or has it been happening for 1,000 years?

Weather in your inbox

Forecast Location

Sign Up

By signing up you agree to the Terms & Privacy Policy. Unsubscribe at any time.

There's even a field called paleoclimatology, where they're trying to figure out the records using things like tree rings and core samples to answer questions like, “Is it getting wetter now? Is it getting drier? Is it getting hotter?”

Answering questions like this for the entire world is tricky. We know a lot about the last 100 years in the United States and in some countries, like the United Kingdom, they have records going back 1,000 years. But there are also countries in, say, the middle of Africa, where they have no records.

A lot of countries have climatologists who are trying to build their records, but there's not a huge uniform function around the world that does exactly that. When I’m trying to find information about current flooding and other disasters around the world, I’ve found ReliefWeb to be a good and reliable resource. I’ve also found Em-Dat, the International Disaster Database, to be useful in looking for information on this subject.

You’re right that it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the number of disasters we read about today. Specifically in the last couple of decades, now that TikTok and other social media feeds are online, information gets spread so easily and we simply know about more things that are happening.

I mean, I've done stories here on accidents in the middle of Inner Mongolia that I would have never known about 20 years ago. The news just wouldn't have gone that far. To give just one example, the number of tornadoes that we know about in the U.S. is rising in part because we have so many more storm chasers around the country. They're out there watching all of these things and every single one of them has a camera and a cellphone.

To answer the second part of the question, judging by the records we have, floods are more common today, but the reasons for that are two-fold. On the one hand, you have the typical meteorology answer: As we're getting into a warmer climate, the raindrops are bigger, it's more humid and it's, therefore, a little easier to flood.

But you also have the simple fact that around the world, populations are going up and those people have to have somewhere to live, right? Which means that people are building and moving onto floodplains that weren’t previously occupied. That makes them more vulnerable to flooding and accounts for some of the flooding you hear about today, as well.

Do you have a question to ask the meteorologists at Weather.com? Write to us at [email protected] and we’ll pick a new question each week from readers to answer.