Currently in the Twin Cities — September 27, 2023: Rain slowly tapering off on Wednesday

The weather, currently.

At MSP our multi-day rainfall total as of midday Tuesday is up to 3.41 inches, the most rainfall since August of 2021. It’s enough to have wiped out about 40% of our rainfall deficit since June 1!

The system will continue to be slow to depart with lingering clouds Wednesday and even an isolated shower, but we’ll see more and more peeks of sun into Thursday. We’re still on track for a string of 80 degree days starting Friday into the first days of October.

— Sven Sundgaard

What you need to know, currently.

With drought affecting broad swaths of the Mississippi River valley, river levels have dropped so low that saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico is creeping upriver in the Mississippi itself. At its current rate of progression, the Mississippi will turn too salty for water treatment plants at New Orleans to produce drinking water in just a few weeks.

Since saltwater is more dense than freshwater, the saltwater is actually moving upriver along the riverbed — within the river itself. Federal engineers that maintain the river channel have built a partial dam designed to slow the saltwater’s upstream progression, and increasingly extreme measures will need to be taken once the saltwater reaches New Orleans — like transporting freshwater by barge, and hastily building a water pipeline to the city.

Similar events happened in 1988, 1999, 2012, and again last year — but this one seems especially severe.

As global warming melts ice worldwide, sea level rise will make problems like this worse not just for Louisiana, but all coastal cities worldwide.

— Eric Holthaus

What you can do, currently.

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