Extreme Rainfall Trends In Holland
By Paul Homewood
I have taken a look at extreme daily rainfall in the UK in a number of posts recently, for instance here.
However, one of the longest running meteorological records is at De Bilt in Holland, and KNMI have daily rainfall data in their archive which dates back to 1906. What do these tell us about extreme rainfall?
Figure 1 shows the top 50 rainfall days, equating to 34mm.
Figure 1
The wettest day was in October 2013, with 63.9mm. However, this was only 1mm more than fell in August 1917. As with the UK, we see that the 1970’s and 80’s had a marked absence of really wet days, but I am not sure of there is anything significantly different between recent years and earlier in the 20thC.
We can also check the decadal distribution of these days. Again, we see that really wet days were just as common in the 1940’s and 60’s as lately.
Figure 2
One other useful chart that KNMI produce is for max hourly precipitation each day. This goes back to 1951.
Figure 3
http://climexp.knmi.nl/getdutchrx.cgi?id=someone@somewhere&WMO=260&STATION=DE%20BILT&extraargs=
We often hear it claimed that global warming is making short term rainfall, such as hourly, heavier. The above chart shows this not to be true. The one outstanding event was in June 1953.
There may be a case for arguing that such events have become slightly more common in the last 20 years or so, but they are certainly not getting more intense.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
You are an absolute reporting ‘machine’ Paul
By producing all these factual reports, you may be deemed a National Security risk (That is a risk to the £42 billion in fraudulent CO2 taxes that are collected annually)
If only all the facts were allowed to be presented on the main media stations as often as the phrase Climate Change is used to describe nearly every weather event, but I dont think these media outlets would welcome the abuse they would get from the Temple priests & their Green Shirt bully boys
“We often hear it claimed that global warming is making short term rainfall, such as hourly, heavier. The above chart shows this not to be true. ”
Maybe ‘global’ warming, like Trenberth’s missing heat, occurs where (coincidentally) there are no observational apparatus?
…or they make it up by integrating Doppler radar rates.
Do you mean the missing rain is in the deep, deep oceans?! Egad! They were right – it is far worse than we thought!
(This also explains the rise in sea-levels. So, no matter how much worse we thought it was, it is even worse than that! Don’t panic! Don’t panic!)
I hope no-one tells me that I should have put /sarc off tags on those two, above.
Thanks Paul, Surface runoff has increase markedly because of the tiling up of grass gardens. Rain that went previously into the soil now runs directly into the sewers. For Holland this is extra bad because it also suffers from this same effect in upstream Germany, Belgium and France on the runoff of the River Rhine and Meuse.
smamarver – October 5, 2015 5:41 pm [ https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/10/05/french-floods ]
Concerning French floods: “ 1939 – a year with plenty of rain, including in France: “Southeast England recorded rainfall of more than three times above average in October 1939. Greenwich saw a higher rainfall only in 1888, and before that in 1840.” World War II just commenced!
Regarding the Holland rain record in August 1917 (see post above) occurred with:
“The Third Battle of Ypres, 1917….In Flanders, the Third Battle of Ypres was launched on 31st July….that night rain began to fall. The ground all around the British attackers quickly turned into a quagmire……Due to persistent rain over the next few weeks the whole operation became literally bogged down in thick, sticky Flanders mud. Conditions were so bad that men and horses simply disappeared into the water-filled craters.”
The entire story at: http://www.greatwar.co.uk/ypres-salient/battles-ypres-salient.htm
A bit OT, …….For those that haven’t seen it..
This is TRULY UGLY for the AGW scammers..
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/cruz_vs_warmist_its_ugly/
Sit back and have a good laugh.. avoid coffee on keyboard etc etc
Paul –
If you cut fig. 1 at 2009 you could have plausibly argued a trend towards less extreme rainfall. Just goes to show what length of data is needed to draw conclusions
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/wind-power-cheapest-energy-in-uk-germany-a6684766.html
This article in the Independent today featured in discussion on last evening’s newspaper reviews with predictable responses from the guests on both BBC and SKY, all of whom were either too stupid or too egregious to analyse the content beyond the misleading headline.
It was raining hard when I pulled into the Sonesta in Amsterdam in June, 1987. While checking in, I asked the clerk if it always rained like that. He laughed, and said, “No. We only get a couple of showers a month. This shower has lasted two weeks.”