Europe Having At Least A Lousy Weather Summer As United States And Canada

Large swaths of Greece, especially the island Rhodes,
are on fire after a persistent, record breaking heatwave

 You might have seen glimpses of extreme weather news from Europe in between reports of relentless heat waves in some parts of the United States and extreme floods and storms in other sections of America.   

To confirm, yes, it's a weather summer from hell in much of Europe, too. 

It's kind of the same story as in the United States. Horrible heat and wildfires in the south, storms just a little further north and east. 

Let's take a miserable European tour here:

GREECE 

A long heat wave in Greece has led to scary wildfires, especially on the islands of Rhodes and Corfu. 

At least 19,000 residents and tourists fled Rhodes as the wildfires tour through hotels and resorts on the island.

As NPR reports: 

"The fires struck during peak tourist season in Greece. And while visitors flock to the islands from all over the world, Corfu and Rhodes are especially popular with people from the United Kingdom."

Up to 10,000 British tourists are on Rhodes and many are still trying to get out of the country, but getting to the airport is difficult, never mind finding a flight out. 

NPR again: 

"Some tourists say they had to walk for miles in the heat to reach safety, and local TV footage shows crowds of people walking beneath orange, smoke-filled skies and lying on mattresses in makeshift shelters."

I was also more than a little puzzled when a couple airlines were still flying tourists into Rhodes while tourists who were already there were fleeing fires. 

ITALY 

Heat and powerful storms are the story in Italy.

The southern part of the nation sweltered in record heat, and at least four died in the resulting wildfires. 

Temperatures reached as high as 117 degrees in Sicily. Rome reached 107 degrees, its hottest reading on record for any date. 

Huge hailstones pelted northern Italy. 

About 40 wildfires broke out in Sicily.  The airport in Palermo was temporarily closed because of the nearby fires but has since reopened. 

The heat has turned the Mediterranean Sea into something of a hot tub.  The average surface temperature of the sea reached 83.12 degrees (28.4 C) this week, an all time record high. 

In northern Italy, the hot temperatures interacting with cooler air to the north set off severe thunderstorms, at least one tornado, microbursts and tennis ball sized hail or bigger. One hail stone recovered in northern Italy was 7.89 inches in diameter, the largest hail stone on record for the entire continent of Europe. 

SWITZERLAND

An incredible storm hit the city of La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland and its surroundings northwest of Bern. 

The storm packed winds of 135 mph, which is the equivalent of a category 4 hurricane. Video from the city during the storm looked like such a hurricane.  

One person was killed, several were injured and the area suffered widespread damage to homes, businesses and other buildings. 

The storm was an apparent microburst, which a larger version of a thunderstorm microburst. Macrobursts cover an area at least 2.5 miles in diameter. Winds in them can reach 135 mph, so this Swiss event was definitely a very high end version of this phenomenon. 

There might also have been an embedded tornado. 

 

Venice, Italy, Just Had Its Highest Flood Tide On Record. Here's Why It Wasn't News

The huge flood that didn't happen. The first test of a $6 billion
project worked: A near record storm tide in Venice, Italy
did not flood the historic city, for a change.

 Three years ago, the second highest tide on record hit  flood prone Venice, killing two people and flooding 85 percent of Venice, including St. Mark's Basilica.  

That flood was all over the headlines at the time. 

This past week, a similar tide menaced Venice, and I bet even people who closely pay attention to the news never heard about it. 

That's because Venice this time is fine. 

Here's why, according to the Washington Post:

"That's because of a $6 billion engineering project designed to protect Venice from mass flooding and the exhausting cycle of cleanup and recovery. The lagoon city's inlets are now guarded by 78 rectangular metal barrier, each the height of a five-story building, that are pumped with air and raised from the sea floor any time high waters threaten it. 

It's a landmark climate change solution, one requiring 30 years of planning and 20 years of construction, that has reduced fears of Venice turning into a modern-day Atlantis."

Venice has been inundated more frequently as climate change has raised sea levels. That makes high tides even higher, increasing flood problems in this region. Plus, the land in Venice is sinking, exacerbating the problem.

The actual protections around Venice are pretty cool. On most days, the barricades are hidden under water. Ships come and go just fine. During normal high tides without flooding salt water from the Adriatic flushes out the lagoons of Venice, so the water doesn't turn into a gross mass of algae, pollution, dangerous bugs, stink and yuckiness. 

The expensive safeguards clearly worked for Venice last week, but will that last forever?

As the Washington Post reports, the expensive engineering project that prevented a flood in Venice might not last forever. Projections call for a 30 centimeter (about a foot) rise in sea levels by mid-century. 

If that happens, the $6 billion project that project won't work anymore. At least not as well as it did last week. Of course, if emissions are cut dramatically in the next couple of decades, that would buy more time, making the system that protects Venice last a lot longer .

Venice was protected during the storminess of the past week, but not all of Italy was. 

As Al Jazeera reports, at least seven people, including a newborn and two children, were killed on Ischia island, on the south of Italy, as a landslide triggered by torrential rains hit a small town At last report, five people were still missing.

Five inches of rain poured down on the island within six hours.

Not sure if this tragedy was entire related to climate change, but storms are getting more and more extreme as time goes on. So this in consistent with global warming or weirding or whatever you want to call it. 

 

 

Extreme Rains In Italy, Oman Break Records, Again In Climate Change World

Destruction in Italy after extreme rains fell in Quillano, Italy.
Photo by Taro Pecorano/LaPress/AP

 The weather remains very quiet here in Vermont and will stay that way for probably a week. No news to report here, which is a nice break from any risk of extremes.  

The only thing we need to confront is above normal temperatures through probably at least the third week of October.

This year of weather extremes rolls on elsewhere in the world, of course. As CNN and the Washington Post highlight,  the latest victims were northwestern Italy and Oman. 

The Italian rainfall is almost too wild to believe.

The town of Rossiglione, in Italy's Genoa province, had 29.2 inches of rain in just 12 hours, the most ever recorded in Europe.  For comparison's sake, Rossiglione usually gets about 50 inches of rain per year, so they got more than half that in 12 hours.

For those of us in Vermont who want to compare, it normally takes about 10 months for 29 inches of rain to fall on the Green Mountain State.

There are more impressive rain totals from this Italian storm. In just six hours, 19.5 inches of rain fell on Cairo Monenotte in Genoa Province. And 7.1 inches fell in one hour at  Vicomorasso, about 16 miles east of Rossiglione.

Not surprisingly, the extreme downpours created a massive flood with serious damage. Remarkably and thankfully,  there have so far no reports of casualties from this terrible storm. 

In Oman, a rare cyclone-- we call them hurricanes here in the U.S., hit the nation's northern coast. This area is normally a desert with almost no rain ever. 

In Al Khaburah, Oman, 14 inches of rain fell in six hours.  It normally takes three years for that much rain to fall in that part of Oman.  Huge flooding naturally resulted from this mess. At least 14 people died in the storm. .

The Italian and Oman extreme rains follow other unprecedented floods this year in China, central Europe and New York and New Jersey from former Hurricane Ida. 

Extreme flooding in Oman. Via CNN

A warmer climate means more extreme rain events, so the kind of post you're reading now is going to seem a bit like a broken record.   There will be more and more of these kinds of floods.

It does make me paranoid about us here in Vermont. As we well know, the hilly and steep landscape and all those small brooks and streams easily go wild in heavy rains.  We still shudder when we remember the Tropical Storm Irene floods in 2011.

I don't know if we're primed to get eventually get something worse than Irene in an atmosphere now stoked by climate change.  It might happen next month, ten years from now or never. 

Italy and Oman are far, far away from Vermont. But the recent extreme rains in those two nations still feel too close to home.  

"Storm Alex" Brings Extreme Floods To France, Italy

 It's not just us in the United States that has been experiencing bouts of extreme weather lately.  Parts of Europe is being nailed, too. 

Extreme damage from Storm Alex in France. 
Photo from AFP via BBC.

Storm Alex, as it's called, slammed into France a couple days bringing near hurricane force winds and especially nearly unprecedented rains. 

In some areas near the southern Alps, up to 17.7 inches of rain fell with the storm, an amount that would normally fall over the course of four months.  

The result was historic flooding and landslides. At least four people died, and others are missing. Villages in the southern Alps are cut off. Images on social media show buildings falling into raging rivers and entire hillsides collapsing in landslides.

On the coast near Brittany, winds gusted to 112 mph. 

Similar destruction slammed northwestern Italy, with more bridge collapses and towns cut off from the outside world. 

Alex was not a tropical storm or hurricane. It was a regular mid-latitude storm, but weather patterns allowed it to rapidly grow into an incredibly intense storm.  Strong ridges of high pressure, one over northern Europe and the other over the North Atlantic Ocean, created an opportunity for a strong upper level storm  to form between the two ridges.

This in turn, allowed Alex to become an intense storm. 

There's no way I can accurately pin Storm Alex on climate change. However, scientists do say that a warming overall climate can lead to stronger, more intense storms, so Alex as consistent with that idea. Here are some videos:

The first half of this video in particular is especially harrowing:

Some of the destruction in France, via The Telegraph:

One of many  houses in France being destroyed by the flooding from Alex in this video: