Dawlish wrote in message
...
Well, the first is certain, the second is already showing on the
rainfall radar and the third is moot, as regards the strength, but I'm
becoming increasingly concerned at the weather maps for Saturday and
the possibility of coastal flooding in the SW. Dawlish has already
suffered one bout of flooding this summer, due to exceptionally heavy
rain, but we were spared much worse flooding, as the storm which
brought down so much water, fortunately, brought it to the narrow
outflow at low tide. We might not be so lucky this time.
There are some steep pressure gradients being shown on those charts
and there is a high spring tide in the evening on Saturday. The
morning tide is not quite so high, but it is still a spring. As there
could easily have been half, to an inch of rain over the catchments by
Saturday evening and more rain is forecast then, the potential is
there for flooding, with a possible onshore gale. The Met office have
one of their advisories out, but only for strong winds; netweather
have no warnings, but mention strong winds and heavy rain and only
metcheck seem to have combined the winds, rain and spring tides to
talk about a sea flooding possibility.
In addition, the environment agency has no flood warnings in place.
There are people living on the South Coast who may face disastrous
(for them any flooding of the properties would be disastrous. For some
coastal tourist traders too, there is, IMO, a real possibility that
some damage could be done to their businesses.
Here's a case where two goverment agencies are missing the potential,
in my opinion. One, responsible for the weather, is only forecasting
possible gales and the other, responsible for flood warnings is
mentioning none and not making any mention of the weather. Surely, in
this instance, the possibility of flooding is enough to issue a
warning so people can begin to organise sandbags. If I was living at
sea level in Dawlish, I would be making sure I was prepared for that
possibility, even though, facing East, we may be spared the onshore
nature of the winds.
In this instance, I agree with metcheck and I feel that the risk is
higher than is being shown on the govenment sites and an early flood
possbility warning (advisory, orange warning, or whatever) should be
issued now and well before tomorrow.
Difficult decisions, as always, for the forecasters, but here is a
property and life-threatening possibility and there's not an official
warning of possible coastal flooding anywhere that I can find.
Paul
At least the jetstream maximum over the Channel Approaches has been downed 5
knots over the last days predictions
http://virga.sfsu.edu/gif/jetstream_atl_h36_00.gif
For anyone using shareware/free viewer IrfanView
This is my change of palette to colourise the otherwise undistinguishable
greyscalings for that site, ie going to
Image/Palette/Import
original palette pal file which seems to be just ordinary text file so
should be able to cut and paste into an exported and saved version of the
one representing these grey pics, excluding the final zeros
JASC-PAL
0100
256
255 255 255
0 0 0
76 76 76
0 0 179
158 158 158
163 163 163
168 168 168
174 174 174
179 179 179
184 184 184
255 76 76
189 189 189
194 194 194
199 199 199
204 204 204
209 209 209
215 215 215
220 220 220
225 225 225
230 230 230
235 235 235
240 240 240
245 245 245
250 250 250
Amended to colour up the greyscale, again minus all the zero elements
JASC-PAL
0100
256
255 255 255
0 0 0
76 76 76
0 0 179
255 0 0
255 170 170
236 236 0
255 255 191
0 255 0
170 255 170
255 76 76
0 255 255
170 255 255
0 0 255
170 170 255
255 0 255
255 170 255
255 128 0
255 213 170
0 128 0
0 210 0
128 0 64
255 53 53
200 189 60