News about March’s bad weather
For comparison, two satellite images taken by ESA satellites show the aftermath of the flood that destroyed March on September 15.
Credit: ESA
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News about March’s bad weather
An explanatory animation made up of satellite images shows the aftermath of the catastrophic floods that hit central France on Thursday, September 15, with another one causing carnage and massive damage. This time the people of the Marches were hit by the fury of water and mud, among the most devastated municipalities are Senigallia, Ostra, Trecastelli, Barbara, Cantiano, Castellone di Suasa and Serra Sant’Abondio. As of today, Tuesday, September 20, there are 11 victims, up to fifty injured, 150 displaced and two missing, including an 8-year-old child. The president of the region, Francesco Acquaroli, said that the damage amounted to at least 2 billion euros.
From space one cannot hear the pain and destruction spread along the streets covered with mud, debris, trunks and wrecked cars, but one can observe the macroscopic effects of nature’s fury. A GIF animation shared by the European Space Agency’s ESA EarthObservation Twitter profile compares two images taken by the Copernicus mission’s Sentinel satellites before and after the flood on September 12 and September 18. An image taken after the event shows the shores of the Adriatic Sea, mostly inundated with sediments, flowing into the sea through overflowing rivers and other outlet channels. Unsurprisingly, the largest concentration of rainfall is just outside Senigallia, where the Misa River – whose overflow caused the most damage – flows its winding 45km course through the Ancona region.
To understand how devastating and unexpected the storm was, just consider that on September 15 at 10 pm in Senegal, Mesa was only 21 centimeters high, but at 11:45 pm it reached 5.31 meters, as reported on Facebook by the Water Resources Observatory. ANBI (Association National Consortium for Area and Irrigation Water Management and Protection), based on data from the Marches Regional Hydro-Rain Meteorology Network. Similarly, the Essino Centino River tributary dropped from a daily record negative of 41 centimeters to 3.67 meters on September 15 at 19:30. These figures should not be surprising considering that in Cantiano alone, one of the most affected municipalities, 420 mm of rain fell between 15:00 and 22:30, of which only 200 mm fell at 5:00. That’s a monstrous amount of water, compared to 50% of this fall for all of 2021. In the municipality of Barbara, 127 mm of rain also fell between 15:00 and 22:45, while in Skhegiya, as reported by ANBI, 187.2 of them fell, with 50 millimeters falling between 17:30 and 19:30.
At that time, storms were also occurring in other parts of central / eastern France, and that is why all the Adriatic coasts, from Friuli to Puglia, as shown in the ESA photo, were full of sediment carried by rivers and streams. . As experts point out, these catastrophic events are a direct result of climate change, due to very high temperatures caused by the greenhouse effect, which loads the atmosphere with energy, and is then forced to escape from it in more violent and dramatic events. Like the catastrophic storms of the last days.