In these days when Northern Italy has been overwhelmed by a violent wave of bad weather, Emilia Romagna he had to deal with violent people temporal which caused intense storms and violent hailstorms in a short time. The storms hit in a very localized manner and several locations found themselves whitewashed by hail and under a sudden downpour. The results are flooding and damage to agriculture. In a post on his Facebook page, Pierluigi Randi, meteorological technician, analyzes the bad weather situation of the last two days in Emilia Romagna, highlighting – data in hand – the exceptional nature of the phenomena that have affected the region.
“We take Bagnacavallo, in the province of Ravenna, but it could have happened in any other location in the Ravenna area. May 15, 2024: 47.8mm. May 16, 2024: 49.0mm. Total: 96.8mm. Thirty-year climatological value of cumulative precipitation in April-May: 114.2 mm. So, in two events, 85% of the rain that normally falls in those two months fell in that location. But there’s more: those 96.8 mm fell in approx 2 and a half hours. Dtherefore: almost there two months’ worth of rain in just over 2 hours”writes Randi.
“Today’s hailstorm was very severe (in quantitative terms), causing serious damage to crops, but unfortunately hail is “at home” in many areas of the regional plain, and after all it is nothing new. The real news is represented by those 96.8 mm in less than three hours. Which is 96.8 liters of water poured into one square meter of surface. Which is 968,000 liters on the surface of one hectare. Which is almost 10,000 quintals of water per hectare poured in just over 2 hours. Which is almost 1000 tons of water per hectare poured in just over 2 hours. And of those almost 1000 tons of water per hectare that fall in an amen, about 3% is absorbed by the soil, the rest goes into runoff. And one hectare isn’t much of a surface area: a square of just 100 m on each side (1.6 football fields)”Randi continues.
“Moral of the story: hail is always a serious calamity, but we must, and will have to, worry more about the events of extreme rain, given that those of these two days are (for our climate). In one year we had two larger scale extreme rain events, orographically forced and due to persistence (2023), and two very small scale extreme rain events, purely convective (QLCS/Supercells) and due to intensity (2024) . And the data confirms it,” concludes Randi, posting a map with the distribution of today’s rainfall (ER-Meteo network), which he defines as “eloquent”: “very high but very localized values; very, very different condition from last year.”
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