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Bob Bingham Blog page.

A series of opinion pieces on, mostly climate change and related subjects to do with New Zealand.

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Cost of rain intensity.

4/9/2014

5 Comments

 
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In the last eight weeks we have had three rain events of around 200 mm and in two of them there have been bursts when the downfall was in the region of 50 mm an hour. We get quite a bit of rain in the winter but this was bordering on the exceptional.

I am part of an environmental group which is improving the quality of water in the Bay of Islands in order to restore the estuary breeding grounds for fish. Erosion of the banks of rivers and streams blankets the normally fertile estuaries with mud and destroys the eco system in which juvenile fish thrive. Without fish nurseries we will not have fish.
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We had just planted a section of a stream to restore vegetation to the banks so that the roots hold the soil together to resist erosion when we had the first 200 mm event. This washed a lot of our recent planting out of the ground. We assembled another team of volunteers and replanted the stream edge. Then we had the second flood event which was bigger and did more damage than the first. We were running low on plants by this time but we recovered what we could and planted more trees when we had the third event. The last one did not have a rain burst and so it did not flood to the same extent but it certainly made us think. It also confirmed the value of our work as we could see the amount of soil lost in the small section on which we were working.


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On a personal level the gutters on my house, which is thirty years old, were not able to cope with the downpour and overflowed leading to water coming into the house. There are just not enough downpipes to the gutters to drain away rain which falls at the rate of 50 mm an hour. So I am in the process of fitting three new downpipes to cope with future rain events.
Are these events becoming more common. Simple science tells us that for every degree in temperature rise the atmosphere can hold 8% more moisture. New Zealand has had a temperature rise of 0.9 Centigrade and so every rain event has an element of climate change in it.

 As Kevin Trenberth said. "The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be”.

I study climate change so I am looking for evidence but am I putting two and two together and making five, am I getting paranoid?



5 Comments
Bob Bristow
5/9/2014 02:57:14 am

I do not think you are getting paranoid at all, I am just under 70 and am convinced the occurrences of flood and heavy precipitation are increasing worldwide, as I get older, recently there have been extreme events in several countries including Siberia, The Balkans, Nepal, India, Japan, South Korea and the U.S.A. Wundergrounds weather historian, Christopher C. Burt is frequently reporting record precipitation events, UNISDR prevention web shows a steady increase since 1980, Munich RE insurance data also shows a strong upward trend on flooding events. NASA has recently made public a mountain of satellite monitored precipitation event data and results should be interesting as time passes by and they roll in.

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/september/international-global-precipitation-measurement-mission-data-goes-public/

Reply
Bob Bingham
6/9/2014 02:51:44 am

Hello Bob. I read the article on Christchurch. Much of the city is only just above sea level and will be flooded within the next 50-100 years. They should have taken the opportunity to build most of the bigger buildings on higher ground but it would have taken a very brave politician to attempt to do that. This is a good website for checking the levels of sea level around the world. http://flood.firetree.net/ .

Reply
Bob Bristow
5/9/2014 04:18:22 am

Just to add an interesting article I read today on Deutsche Welle regarding Christchurch rebuilding and heavy precipitation considerations.

Reply
Bob Bristow
5/9/2014 04:19:37 am

Here is the link-

http://www.dw.de/christchurch-21st-century-atlantis/a-17896813

Reply
Bob Bristow
6/9/2014 03:47:22 am

This morning I was looking through the news as I help as a co-editor on a Climate Related website, and see yet another sad article of flooding and deaths happening right now in Kashmir (Pakistan and India). I know these tragedies have always happened as is frequently pointed out by GHG effect skeptics, but the frequency of these event is really becoming outrageous. .

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/09/05/3563674/kashmir-flooding/

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    Bob Bingham 

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