New European Rainfall Record?
By Paul Homewood
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The fraudsters are at it again:
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It’s the latest extreme rain event supercharged by climate change that follows a summer of historic deluges in the Northern Hemisphere.
In just 12 hours, 29.2 inches of rain fell in Rossiglione in Italy’s Genoa province, roughly 65 miles south-southwest of Milan and 10 miles north of the Mediterranean coastline. It marked the greatest 12-hour rainfall on record in Europe, according to Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist who specializes in world weather extremes.
Extreme weather tormenting the planet will worsen because of global warming, U.N. panel finds
The amount of rain that came down in 12 hours is more than half the typical amount of rain that falls in the region over an entire year, which is just over 50 inches. It’s several times the average October rainfall of 6 to 7 inches.
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On the face of it, this appears to be an unbelievable amount of rainfall, just what the Washington Post want you to believe.
Fortunately though, there are local experts who know otherwise:
https://twitter.com/extremetemps/status/1445429263017127937
Very few weather stations anywhere in the world measured anything other than daily rainfall in the past. It is only recently that automatic gauges were introduced that could take hourly readings. Claims of a 12-hour record are therefore meaningless.
Furthermore many new sites have been added recently in mountainous locations, which inevitably tend to experience extreme rainfall. We have had exactly the same story here, with the Met Office regularly claiming “record rainfalls” at places like Honister Pass, high up in the Lake District, which was only opened up in the 1990s.
But even more significantly our Italian expert points to a much higher rainfall in 1970. So we now know that this month’s deluge was not unprecedented after all.
The Wikipedia article referred to translates as:
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alluvione_di_Genova_del_7_ottobre_1970
Note my highlight, that these sorts of rains are typical of Liguria, particularly in autumn.
There is a very good reason for this. The Ligurian coastline rises very quickly in altitude from the Mediterranean. Rossiglione for instance is just 10 miles from the coast, but is 1000 feet up. The mountains surrounding it are much higher still.
In autumn, the seas are still very warm, so any storm coming up from the south will draw in a lot of warm, moist air. As soon as it it hits Liguria, the air mass is forced thousands of feet upwards, rapidly dumping massive amounts of rain. The same topography ensures that these storms often get stuck in one place, unable to move further inland.
Once again then, the Washington Post has grossly misled its readers.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Such proclamations are oh so tedious. It’s a bit like the BBC trumpeting the latest Met Office projections of warmer winters to come whilst complaining that recent spikes in gas prices have been caused by colder than expected recent Eurasian winter temperatures. Is there anyone who can do joined up thinking currently still alive at the BBC/Met Office? And the AMO hasn’t quite turned negative yet. But it will do soon enough. I look forward to hearing the MO/BBC proudly declaring that the future increase in Arctic sea ice coverage is entirely down to our carbon sins! Oh, and they seemed to have gone a bit quiet on Antarctic ice coverage of late. It must be growing then!
The UK MSM seem to have missed the record cold Antarctic winter. I think this made it to the WP with the comment that the winter was a bit chilly.
Is the AMO about to turn negative? That’s a genuine question. Looking at the cycle I would guess (and it is not much more than a guess) that it had about another 10 years before it does that.
With respect to Italy (back when CO2 was effectively pre-industrial), they had a drought in 1921 that was also widespread in Europe. It was reported in the news media at the time…
ITALY: July 30. The principal phenomenon…was the intensely hot weather. An unprecedented heat wave continued to develop in its intensity of heat and in its length and duration.
ITALY: Venice, July 30. The principal phenomena which prevailed [this week] was the intensely hot weather. An unprecedented heat wave continued to develop in its intensity of heat and in length of its duration. For several weeks the heat has increased until the past week the temperature has been up in the high nineties for day after day, and unofficial reports of over 100° have been frequent. The extremely high humidity has practically brought active business to a standstill, and has caused many deaths and heat exhaustions. The principal damage caused by the heat wave is the protracted period of drought which accompanies it. Agriculture is the chief sufferer from the heat and drought and no alleviation appears in sight. Weeks of cloudless scorching days have played havoc with the crops which were in progress when the heat wave began”.
Atmospheric CO2? About 280 ppm. Air conditioning? None. Don’t know what it was in Scotland at that time… where all this man-made CO2 will soon be discussed and “urgent” action will be again be strongly recommended.
What a meaningless post .. Atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1921 was around 304 ppm – not 280 ppm – and the events of that year , particularly heatwaves and drought , are irrelevant to European precipitation records …. I did happen to write about the year 1921 a few days ago though on Tony Heller’s page
There was a similar cause for the floods in Boscastle, Cornwall in August 2004.
The uptake of moisture over warm seas then hitting a steep coastline.
The quantity of rain was much lower than in Liguria, but the subsequent flood washed the centre of the village.
Fortunately no lives were lost as seven navy helicopters rescued people from roof and trees.
It was remarkable how localised the rainfall was.
http://Www.en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Boscastle_flood#Causes_of_the_flood
Mustn’t forget Lynmouth 1953!
The result of 9 inches of rain on Exmoor, which was already saturated. Even back in those days the BBC was involved in a conspiracy theory, trying to link the rainstorm to cloud-seeding experiments.
Where 34 lives were lost. A rather bad year 1953 with 300 dying in the East coast storm.
Fact checker – first one in was Navy chopper, from Culdrose Air-Sea Rescue team (ASR).. He dropped his tail onto the roof of the Harbour light building to enable people to climb in safely. Wow!. RAF were second there, but complained that the Navy “just went and did”, Efforts were not coordinated well between the two, because they were on different radio frequencies. The helicopter rescue services have since been privatised to reduce costs. Many of the same pilots, though, and they still enjoy doing it.
These “unprecedented climate disasters” are getting unprecidentally ridiculous.
Don’t forget that standard rain guages used to have a finite capacity, after which they would just overflow.
And in any case, why imagine that “the highest [enter weather phenomenon here] recorded EVER (actually in the last 20 years) for a third Tuesday in November” is a big deal?
Even if you weren’t aware that the MET Office, BBC, Grauniad, Government Ministers etc. were all a bunch of incompetent fraudsters who would be very happy to just pluck a scary number out of their flabby arses, if that would keep Project Fear up and running.
Don’t forget also, that intensity of precipitation is reckoned to be inversely proportional to the catchment area.
That’s what we were taught in a ‘basic’ impounding reservoir design module at Sheffield University as part of our Civil and Structural Engineering Honours Degree course, nearly 60 years ago. I think there was even a fancy empirical formula for it, actually based on genuine measurements.
No-one seemed to have an axe to grind, or a thumb on the scales, back in the day.
“Tormenting the planet”
Not only absurd but this was 12 hours in one small location. The rest of the planet had no idea it happened.
And I wasn’t aware the Med was particularly warm at the moment, certainly not warm enough to “supercharge” the atmosphere there? In which case this is total nonsense.
Well it is the WaPo, so total nonsense is not unexpected.
I think the main purpose of this kind of nonsensical “news” is to give simplistic ammunition, for use in our Marxist-infested schools. Another “factoid” to slap down any child who dares to question the narrative.
Of course, there is also a need for the true believers to receive a dose of comforting reinforcement every day while awaiting their version of the Second Coming.
No normal adult in the UK gives a toss about autumnal flash flooding in the worthless mountains of Liguria.
‘Supercharged by climate change’ is just another empty pop soundbite to throw at the already climate-confused public.
Automatic weather stations may be cheaper to operate than ones with observers, but they are much less reliable. There has been an avalanche of missing days of data since the late 20th century, when AWS was introduced. For example, I recently tried to update my history of Cape Town rainfall, but failed due to the many missing days of data in the only station now reporting new data in GHCND.
This issue may be a problem for monthly rainfall totals. For example the Australian BoM has several recent monthly totals for Amberley AMO (a meteorological office near Brisbane) when there are around 4 or 5 missing days: they simply assume no rain on those days. This biases the monthly totals to values lower than they actually are, a gift to record drought-chasers.
Similar huge rainfalls are a feature of eastern Spain, where hills rise abruptly from the sea. The local name for this phenomenon in Valencia province is the ‘Gota Fria’ (Cold Drop), typically when an upper level low gets cut off and remains stationary in the area. It is caused when the cool air of Autumn is drawn in from further north in Europe and meets with the Mediterranean still at its warmest. It doesn’t happen every year, but when it does the rains can be phenomenal. There is a similar phenomenon in Languedoc or Provence.
In October 1957 a great storm hit Valencia province. In Javea (Xabia) – 871mm of rain fell in a single day (2 October) and 978mm in the period 1-3 October. Possibly more than 1,000 mm fell during the two days nearby but the gauges overflowed because they couldn’t be emptied fast enough!. In the City of Valencia itself a major flood also occurred later the same month in October 1957. Estimates of the frequency of the 1957 flood suggested that up to 75 floods had taken place in the area in the previous 700 years.
In 2007 a similar flood affected Javea again on 12th October and gave 437 mm of rain in one day. Amongst other storms we have 1987, when Oliva recorded 817mm in a day and another location recorded 426 mm in one day only a couple of weeks before. More than 600mm was recorded in 24 hours an adjoining province in 1973.