Spain’s year worth of rain in 8 hours

By Sharon Kimathi, Energy and ESG Editor, Reuters Digital

Hello,

At least 95 people have been killed in possibly the deadliest flooding to hit Spain in its modern history after torrential rain battered the eastern region of Valencia, sweeping away bridges and buildings, local authorities said.

Meteorologists said a year's worth of rain had fallen in eight hours in parts of Valencia on Tuesday, causing pile-ups on highways and submerging farmland in a region that produces two-thirds of the citrus fruit grown in Spain, a leading global exporter.

Video taken by emergency services from a helicopter showed bridges that had collapsed and cars and trucks piled on top of each other on highways between flooded fields outside the city of Valencia.

Power company i-DE, owned by Europe's biggest utility, Iberdrola, said about 150,000 clients in Valencia had no electricity.

There was also flooding in other parts of the country, including the southern region of Andalusia, and forecasters warned of more bad weather ahead as the storm moved in a northeasterly direction.

Also on my radar today:

Eva Defez, 50, gets hugged by a friend outside her home after spending the night stranded at her home with her family due to floods in Utiel, Spain. REUTERS/Susana Vera 

The deadly floods were caused by a destructive weather system in which cold and warm air meet and produce powerful rain clouds, a pattern believed to be growing more frequent due to climate change.

The phenomenon is known locally as DANA, a Spanish acronym for high-altitude isolated depression, and unlike common storms or squalls it can form independently of polar or subtropical jet streams.

When cold air blows over warm Mediterranean waters it causes hotter air to rise quickly and form dense, water-laden clouds that can remain over the same area for many hours, raising their destructive potential.

The event sometimes provokes large hail storms and tornadoes as seen this week, meteorologists say.

This week's DANA was one of the three most intense such storms in the last century in the Valencia region, Ruben del Campo, spokesperson for the national weather agency Aemet, said.

Experts say it will take time to analyze all the data to determine if this particular DANA was caused by climate change.

Most agree that an increase in the temperature of the Mediterranean and warmer and more humid atmospheric conditions contribute to producing more frequent extreme episodes.

"We're going to see more of these flash floods in the future. This has the fingerprints of climate change on it, these terribly heavy rainfalls, and these devastating floods," said Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology at the University of Reading.

She said even early warnings of heavy rain based on reliable forecasts did little to prevent the fatalities and people needed to understand the real danger.

"Just telling people that it's going to rain quite a lot, it's not good enough...We could see that people were putting themselves at risk driving in floodwaters, and there was just so much water that it has overwhelmed these places," Cloke said.

Local authorities have not disclosed how many people are still unaccounted for after Europe's deadliest floods in years, but Defence Minister Margarita Robles said the death toll was likely to rise.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks during a press conference at the 16th United Nations Biodiversity Summit (COP16), in Yumbo, Colombia. REUTERS/Luisa Gonzalez

A strong Typhoon Kong-rey made landfall on Taiwan's east coast on Thursday, the largest storm by size to hit the island in nearly 30 years, closing financial markets, causing hundreds of flights to be canceled and reducing rail services.

The typhoon knocked out power to nearly half a million households, the government said.

A Lidar image shows what archeologists in Mexico say is a newly discovered lost Mayan city they named Valeriana, Campeche, Mexico. Antiquity Publications Ltd/Handout via REUTERS 

It's yet another technology-based focus in today's spotlight as the use of Lidar, or Light Detection and Ranging – a technology that uses lasers to map and analyze archaeological landscapes – helped archaeologists in Mexico to discover a huge, lost Mayan city.

The city, which they named Valeriana, is hidden deep in the southern jungle of Campeche –  a sprawling, urban settlement replete with architectural marvels and agricultural infrastructure.

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