Americans have been reading all summer about the megadrought gripping the Western United States a devastating event that has required water cuts along the Colorado River and which climate change has undoubtedly made worse.

In the Eastern U.S., a different kind of climate threat has wreaked havoc over the last week: megafloods.

Tropical Storm Fred dumped more than 10 inches of rain in western North Carolina, triggering flash floods that killed at least five people . In Tennessee, at least 22 people were killed and more than 200 homes destroyed after a giant storm unleashed up to 17 inches of rain , causing rivers to quickly swell. In the Northeast, slow-moving Tropical Storm Henri drenched New York City and other major metropolitan areas, causing as much as $4 billion in losses . Central Park saw nearly 2 inches of precipitation in a single hour, likely the most of any one-hour period on record .

The string of U.S. floods comes about a month after catastrophic flooding in Germany and Belgium, which left a trail of destruction and killed nearly 200 people .

Megadroughts and megafloods might seem like opposites, but they are in fact two sides of the same deadly coin. As human greenhouse gas emissions drive up global temperatures, the world can expect both extreme events to become more frequent and severe, warned a recent landmark report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Theres increasing evidence for an overintensification of the water cycle, said Alex Ruane, a NASA scientist and a lead author of the IPCC reports chapter on regional impacts. Water is moving through the climate system faster than it used to. That means it is being evaporated into the air faster, its being moved around, and its raining down harder when it does rain. All of these things are actually connected to the same factor, which is that warmer air has a tendency to hold more moisture.

The current conditions across the country drought in the West and torrential precipitation in the East highlight a trend that scientists have been documenting in recent decades and offer a glimpse of what to expect in the coming years.

These are examples of the type of conditions that we think are going to be more and more widespread and pronounced with each increment of climate change, Ruane said.