No creo que sea verdad eso de los 60 años. Mirad y perdonad que está en inglés:
One of the jobs I have given myself -- simply because no-one else does it -- is to place destructive or exceptional weather events into a proper historical and statistical context. "I can't remember the last time it rained like this" is all very well as an opening gambit down at the pub, but such subjective remarks should have no place in news bulletins or weather reports.
Usually, it is easy to find many examples, quickly forgotten by most folk, of earlier examples of extreme weather. The Yorkshire deluge in late June, for instance, mirrored similar deluges in the same county in June 1982 and July 1973. Although this summer is beginning to look like a real record-breaker in terms of quantity and frequency of rain, the prolonged downpour which affected such a large part of England and Wales on Thursday night and Friday has been equalled or exceeded a number of times in the last century.
On Friday, 50mm or more of rain fell across a huge triangular-shaped zone stretching from Maidstone in the east to Bristol in the west to Shrewsbury in the north -- an area twice as large as that affected by the late-June rainstorm in northern England. 100mm or more fell over much of Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, and small parts of Wiltshire and Warwickshire. Pershore recorded a two-day total of 157.4mm and RAF Brize Norton reported 127.8mm. In the last 50 years, the only high-summer downpours which matched last week's in both volume and geographical extent occurred on August 25, 1986 -- the Bank Holiday washout associated with ex-hurricane "Charley" -- July 28, 1969, and July 10, 1968. On that occasion the 100mm threshold was exceeded at 65 rain-monitoring sites in a massive area extending from Devon to Lincolnshire, and 173mm fell, mostly within six hours, at Chew Stoke in Somerset. The resulting floods were just as severe, and probably more widespread, than anything seen this summer.
It is tempting to describe this season as a iretro summeri because in so many respects it is reminiscent of the many appalling summers that readers of a certain age will recall from the 1950s, 1960s, and early-1970s. It is also interesting to note that summer floods occurred much more frequently during epochs (for instance 1912-1931 and 1948-1974) when summers were relatively cool.
© Philip Eden
5 Respuestas
2249 Vistas