At least four people are dead after a stalled weather front dumped more than a foot of water on central Alabama Wednesday night. Torrential rainfall, just south of Birmingham, prompted a top-tier “flash flood emergency” from the National Weather Service. Extreme precipitation is a hallmark signal of human-caused climate change, and new research from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research finds, on average, one in four rainfall records in the last decade can be attributed to climate change. (AL.com, Washington Post $, AP, Weather Channel, CNN; Climate Signals background: Extreme precipitation increase)

Correction: The rainfall occurred on the night of Wednesday, October 6.