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Canada: Satellite images show the extent of the flooding

2021-11-22T04:10:01.093Z


Extreme rains on the Pacific coast turned northwest Canada into a disaster area about a week ago. Satellite images show the extent of the flooding.


Enlarge image

Flooded area near Ferndale, Washington State on November 16

Photo:

NASA Earth Observatory

Within 24 hours, torrential rains turned northwest North America into a disaster area just over a week ago.

Floods and mudslides forced tens of thousands of people to flee in the Canadian province of British Columbia.

Hundreds were brought to safety by military helicopters.

The floods are an event that only happens every 500 years, said British Columbia Prime Minister John Horgan.

Several main roads and a rail link to Vancouver had to be closed.

The Canadian west coast metropolis could only be reached from the south from the USA.

The NASA satellite image above shows November 14th when many monitoring stations in Canada recorded the highest levels of rainfall ever recorded.

The darker the red, the more rain fell in one day, often up to ten centimeters, which corresponds to around 100 liters per square meter.

The data are estimates from the IMERG satellite program, which measures global precipitation.

Historic rain records

In the metropolis of Vancouver (5.3 cm of precipitation) and at Hope Airport (17.4 cm), historical daily records were set.

A little further south, in Bellington (7.0 cm) in the US state of Washington, it was the fifth highest value ever measured.

The next day it rained so hard that the previous 48-hour record was exceeded.

Another satellite image (bottom and top) shows the region on November 16.

Even the beginning of autumn was above average rainy along the northern Pacific coast.

Since the soil had already absorbed a lot of water, floods formed and entire villages flooded.

More than 1,000 people were stranded in Hope when the streets out of town were blocked by mudslides.

Around the town of Abbotsford, several farms were flooded so badly that people had to rescue cows with the help of boats, as reported by CNN.

"When I see calves that are underwater and being thrown into the boats, it breaks my heart," said Mayor Henry Braun.

In the meantime it looked as if all 160,000 residents would have to be evacuated.

The pineapple express brought the rain

Last week's torrential rains resulted from a weather system called "atmospheric flow."

These celestial rivers can be thousands of kilometers long and transport enormous amounts of moisture, initially in the form of water vapor, from the subtropics towards the north.

In cooler regions, the water vapor condenses and forms rain clouds.

The heavy rains, which reached as far as the northwest of the USA, came with the so-called Pineapple Express.

This is the atmospheric river that carries warm water vapor from near Hawaii to the west coast of North America, thus supplying parts of the continent with water and repeatedly causing floods.

In the future, the rivers in the sky could bring significantly more rain from south to north due to global warming.

This is suggested by computer simulations from Yale University, which were recently published in "Nature Climate Change".

This increases the risk of extreme weather events such as floods in entire regions.

In coastal regions in particular, the risk of storms and floods is increasing, the researchers write.

Daily rainfall is forecast for this week.

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Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2021-11-22

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