Kendon said: "It's the hourly rainfall rates that you look at in summer." The rain tends to fall in shorter but more intense bursts, caused by convective storms, but this has been difficult for climate models to simulate, because they lack the ability to home in on such brief events. It took the Met Office supercomputer, one of the most powerful in the world, nine months to run the necessary simulations.

If these events are on the increase in the summer months as their research concludes, isn't it a shame that the Met Office and Environment Agency don't release 'real time' hourly rainfall data from the hundreds of automatic gauges in their network for the rest of us to see and not just for some University research?

I'm sure it is not beyond the realms of science fiction that someone else could then use that information to create a mobile app that could alert the public about any flash flooding event that is occurring now?


Quite agree.

I don't understand why realtime data isn't more quickly acted upon. That might help avoid situations like the last Boscastle flood when a weather warning was issued just after the helicopters arrived to winch people off rooftops, and hours after the 1st development of thunderstorms in Cornwall. (Thunder was audible in Penzance most of the morning.)

Talking of Boscastle, many people seem to think there was only 1 similar flood in the 1950's, in fact there were 2 of similar, if not slightly greater (going by photographs) floods in that decade. It's just that 1 missed the rainguage network completely and is either ignored or details combined with the other flood. The reason so much damage was done last time was due to cars etc. being swept off the nice new NT car park into buildings & bridges. I'm sure the huge area of tarmac helped speed the water flow nicely.

Nothing's changed since car park wise of course (though the village now looks even more like a NT Theme Park than before - don't forget your Boscastle Apron & chocolate) as it was deemed such a rare event. Going by the number of similar floods in the Camelford/Wadebride/Boscastle area in the last 100 years, I don't know how that conclusion was reached. Presumable if the rainfall wasn't accurately recorded, as it wasn't on most occasions it didn't exist.

Graham
Penzance

A north Cornwall sea breeze front storm I witnessed develop
http://www.turnstone-cottage.co.uk/SrMerrynStorm.PDF