Extreme Flooding In Central, Eastern Europe Claims At Least 21 Lives

Flooding in central Europe has killed at least 21 people
and caused widespread destruction across several nations.

 Weather patterns in much of the northern hemisphere are kind of stuck, meaning certain areas keep getting the same weather day after day.  

For us in Vermont, we lucked out. In central and eastern Europe, the weather pattern has contributed to an extreme flood disaster that has so far claimed 21 lives and counting.

Widespread and record flooding are hitting large swaths of central and eastern Europe.  

So far the worst of it has hit Romania, Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic and parts of Germany. The flooding is spreading into Hungary, Italy, Slovakia, Croatia and other countries as the slow moving storm meanders over Europe.  

Large parts of southwestern Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria have received more than eight inches of rain. Jesenik in the Czech Republic had 18.2 inches of rain in four days. That amount of rain normally falls there over six months. Some towns in Austria had 14 or more inches of rain over four days. 

Also, high water is spreading into major rivers like the Danube. Budapest, Hungary residents were told to expect the worst flood there in at least a decade. 

In the Czech Republic, the flooding was described as worse than the devastating floods in 1997 which were up until now known as "flood of the century." A fifth of the 56,000 residents in the city of Opava have been moved to higher ground.

Poland was especially hard hit.  Crews on helicopters were plucking people off roofs in Klodzko, a town with about 25,000 residents. Numerous other Polish towns and cities were also flooded. 

 A worst case scenario meteorological set up created this big calamity. A burst of Arctic air, much stronger than you'd expect for this time of year, plunged southward into central Europe. To the east of that cold front, warm, very humid air streamed northward from the Mediterranean Sea. 

The water temperature in that sea is at near record high levels, thanks largely to climate change. That allowed even more water vapor and moisture to feed into the storm. The whole thing stalled over central Europe, leading to days of torrential downpours. 

The Arctic air combined with all that moisture also led to unprecedented September snows in the Austrian Alps. Up to ten feet of snow fell on some high elevations, and a few spots had their first September snows on record. 

While the intensity of the cold is easing somewhat, the strong storm continues to meander under a blocked weather pattern that is not allowing systems to move in and out of any particular spot readily. 

This blocked up weather pattern in the northern hemisphere is having consequences elsewhere, though Europe is getting the worst of it. The blockiness is why that weird sort of semi-tropical storm lingered off the coast of North Carolina, sending boatloads of moisture inland to create massive flash floods from up to 20 inches of rain. 

Videos:

The following Associated Press video of flooding and rescues in the Czech Republic remind me of what Vermont went through in the past two summers. Click on this link or if you see the image below, click on that. 

More news footage of the flooding shows the water overtaking a beautiful European city: Again, click on this link or if you see the image below, click on that.