Weather in Singapore driest since 1869

The prolonged dry weather affecting Singapore since mid-January has set a new record for the driest month since 1869, according to the National Environment Agency (NEA).

At the Changi climate station, the rainfall total recorded last month was 0.2mm, breaking the previous record of 6.3mm in February 2010.

Apart from being the driest month ever, last month is the most windy month in the last 30 years.

At the Changi climate station, the average daily wind speed of 13.3 kilometre per hour (kph) recorded last month exceeds the previous high of 12.5kph in January 1985.

The prolonged dry conditions have also set a new record for the lowest average daily relative humidity of 74.5%.

The previous record low for February and any month of the year was 76.9% (February 1968) and 74.6% (June 2013).

The last day of significant rainfall was on February 16 when between 0.2mm and 29m was recorded in various parts of the island.

Since then, there has been little or no rainfall, with Singapore entering another period of dry spell on February 17.

The dry weather affecting Singapore and the surrounding region is expected to persist in the first half of this month.

With the expected onset of the inter-monsoon in the second half of this month, the winds in the region will turn light and variable in direction.

Increased rainfall can be expected in the later part of the month.

With the dry weather expected to continue, the National Water Agency has started a public campaign to get everyone to conserve water. – Bernama, March 4, 2014. More

 

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Massive Flooding Shuts Down Entire Region of Northern Colorado Read more: PHOTOS: Massive Flooding Shuts Down Entire Region of Northern Colorado

The Northern Colorado Front Range is experiencing an unprecedented flood that has stranded and displaced thousands of residents and shut down well over a dozen towns.

Every river and stream in an 80 mile swath from west of Denver to Ft Collins has overflowed its banks, taking out major highways to towns in the mountains, and flooding entire communities downstream. While flooding has been a concern for years and flood controls have been built up, the sheer scale and volume of the rains have ground Colorado to a halt while altering the landscape to an unrecognizable state and prompting a state of emergency throughout the region. From my vantage on a mountain 10 miles west of Fort Collins, the sound of water cascading through the vast valley below fills the air, and all roads further west are closed.

The true scope of the damage will not be known for some time. The record-breaking forest fires in Larimer County and Colorado Springs last year have hampered the ability of the landscape to absorb the water, which has only aggravated the damage. The large rain totals (which have been gauged up to 11 inches in Boulder and 15 inches higher up) are a result of monsoonal moisture traveling north from the Gulf of Mexico. That moisture combined with a low pressure system to the west has created an upslope weather phenomena in which the Rocky Mountains literally squeeze the rain out of the clouds.

While the rains are finally subsiding, the volume of water in the mountains streams is actually picking up, closing virtually every bridge in Larimer and Boulder counties. Many roads near valley streams are destroyed along with homes and businesses. Some towns are completely isolated,including Lyons, and Estes Park (at the base of Rocky Mountain National Park) is only accessible by Trail Ridge Road – the highest paved road in the US. Many homes through the mountains are also cut off due to the roads being made impassable, if not outright destroyed.

In the larger cities at the base of the Front Range, most major bridges have closed, including I25, and neighborhoods scattered from Fort Collins to Denver have been evacuated as the waters find their way down from the mountains. Some of the flooding concerns come from failed dams like the one at Rocky Mountain Arsenal, which prompted thousands of homes to be evacuated in Commerce City, just north of Denver. Many low-laying areas near rivers all along the Front Range have also been evacuated. Others residents have been asked to shelter in place as the scale of the flooding makes many roads impassable. More rain forecasted for this weekend will keep the state on high alert. More

 

Monsoon 2013: Rain calamity strikes Pakistan

Incessant rainfall wreaked havoc across the country on Saturday, triggering flash floods up north, damaging infrastructure, submerging villages and inundating cities and towns. In all, at least 51 people were killed and many more injured, while the damage to properties was seen as colossal.

Life in Karachi, the teeming metropolis of over 16 million, came to a grinding halt as it received the first downpour of the current monsoon. At least 16 people – among them eight children – died in rain-related incidents as provincial authorities called in army troops to help drain out rainwater from different neighbourhoods. Most of the fatalities were caused by electrocution and drowning.

The rain caused dozens of feeders of the Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) to trip, which resulted in power outages in almost half of the city. As most drains were clogged, rainwater and sewage flooded the busiest arteries and thoroughfares of the city, causing gridlocks at different places. Several cars and mini-buses also broke down in the middle of the roads adding to the traffic mess.

Angered by the mismanagement of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation, the Sindh government sacked its administrator Syed Hashim Raza Zaidi and Municipal Services chief Masood Alam.

Although the posh and residential neighbourhoods were no exception, the worst-hit were the slums and villages on the edge of the city.

Around 250 houses of Babu Basti and Bhund Goth were partially damaged after the Thado River broke its banks in Malir area. Most residents fled their homes to seek shelter in a state-run school in nearby Soomar Kandi village.

Similarly, over a dozen houses were damaged in Badai Jokhio village while the situation in another six villages near the Sukkan River is also critical. Latt Basti and Ali Muhammad Jatt Goth were also inundated when the nearby drain overflowed.

“Army troops have started draining out the rainwater,” a military spokesperson told The Express Tribune. “The troops have been draining water from Natha Khan Goth, Sharea Faisal, Airport and its surrounding areas,” he added.

Other major cities of Sindh, including Hyderabad, Mirpurkhas, Sukkur and Sanghar also received heavy rainfall. In some areas, irrigation canals overflowed and inundated villages. In all, three fatalities were reported from rural Sindh.

In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and its adjoining tribal regions, at least 19 people died as flash floods damaged properties and farmlands. Fatalities were reported in Chitral, Peshawar, Bannu, Lakki Marwat, FR Tank and tribal agencies of North Waziristan and Kurram.

As of now, Chitral is the worst-affected district where over 100 houses, three small power houses and eight small bridges have been swept away. Officials, however, say they haven’t been able to assess the damage in the remote areas of the district due to the difficult mountainous terrain.

In Tank district, the union councils of Warsponn, Pai and Gulam Imam were flooded where dozens of houses were damaged and farmlands affected. Local administrator Muhammad Ali Shah claimed that the floodwater was receding. In Peshawar, scores of houses were inundated when Budhni stream broke its banks, forcing people in the neighbourhood to move to safer places.

According to the Flood Control Cell, most of the rivers in the province are in normal or medium- level flood except the Kurram and Gambela rivers in Bannu district which are in high flood. Landslides triggered by heavy downpour blocked the strategic Karakoram Highway at three places, suspending traffic between Rawalpindi and Gilgit-Baltistan. “The traffic between G-B and Rawalpindi is suspended due to the blockage of the KKH,” said a spokesman for the Northern Areas Transport Corporation,” a government-sponsored transport company.

Balochistan also bore the brunt of the devastating monsoon spell. At least eight people were reportedly killed and dozens of villages submerged, displacing hundreds of people in the province. Jhal Magsi is the worst-affected district where 25 villages have been virtually washed away, according to Khalid Baloch, the director general of the PDMA. Jhal Magsi is literally cut off from the rest of the province as the main highway has been flooded.

Naseerabad district received incessant rain for 15 hours. The ensuing flood devastated over half a million acres of farmlands. In the neighbouring Jaffarabad district, the whole town, including government offices, is under knee-deep water. Several villages have also been flooded.

Similarly, Sibi, Loralai and Lasbela districts have also been affected where scores of mud-houses have been swept away by flash floods.

Hill torrents unleashed by heavy rains swept through the impoverished south Punjab where at least five people were reportedly dead and 200,000 acres of farmlands ravaged by floodwater.

To deal with the calamity, the authorities have declared a state of emergency in the districts of Dera Ghazi Khan, Rajanpur and Jampur. All officials on leave have been called back for duty. The office of the chief minister is monitoring the situation round-the-clock.

In DG Khan, the Ronghan, Raakhi Gaaj and Vahowa areas are the worst hit where more than 100 villages have been submerged, uprooting hundreds of villagers from their homes.

In Rajanpur, the house Punjab Assembly Deputy Speaker Sher Ali Gorhacni and the farmhouse of former premier Yousuf Raza Gilani have also been inundated.

According to an official tally, 100,000 people have been affected by the ongoing flash floods. Some tourists are also reported to have been trapped in the tribal belt of Rajanpur. More

 

 

 

Rescue operations in Western Japan prefectures underway after torrential rain

Western Japan is now the target of full-scale search and rescue operations that started Monday morning, as the region was hit with a record amount of rain on Sunday.

There are a lot of people, estimated to be in the hundreds, in Yamaguchi and Shimane Prefectures stranded by the flooding due to the tremendous amount of rain. The Japan Meteorological Agency warned the region specifically that it will experience “unprecedentedly heavy rains”, and residents were advised to be vigilant regarding incoming floods and mudslides.

In Hagi, Yamaguchi Prefecture, 79-year-old Yoshino Tashima was found under a collapsed house and was confirmed dead. At least 10 people in the area were injured in one way or another. The downpour also caused locations to be isolated due to mudslides, and around 480 people were being rescued by helicopter from different areas in the prefecture. Some 200 primary school students who were attending a summer camp in the prefecture were trapped due at a prefectural youth nature center near Tokusagamine mountain. Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force members rescued them by helicopter early Monday.

In Tsuwano, Shimane Prefecture, around 200 residents from three districts were still stranded as of noon, according to reports from the area. Some residents in the town’s Nayoshi district were also transported by helicopter because of the flooding. The record-breaking rains also affected the train region’s train service. JR Yamaguchi Line was rendered partially out of service as a bridge and other facilities had been affected by floodwaters. A farmer in the Nayoshi district of Tsuwano said, “The river swelled immediately, and an asphalt surface of a prefectural road collapsed.”

The torrential rains have brought one month’s worth of rain to these areas in just one day, according to reports. The Japan Meteorological Agency has urged the public to remain vigilant, because even if the rain has stopped for now, heavy rain is again expected in the area on Monday night due to a weather system brought by westerly winds. The Japanese central government is already assessing the damage in the area. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said at a press conference Monday that an investigation team headed by Yasutoshi Nishimura, senior vice minister in the Cabinet Office, would be sent to Yamaguchi and Shimane prefectures to assess the rain damage. More

 

Mudslides in China kill 21, four missing

The landslides triggered by heavy rains struck just south of the city of Dingxi where Monday's earthquake left 95 dead, five missing and more than 800 people in hospital.

Nine villages under the city of Tianshui remained out of contact as of Saturday morning after the storms knocked out power, cut off communications and blocked roads, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

The heavy storms and mudslides left one village, Rongguang, filled with debris, damaging more than half of the village homes and burying villagers, Xinhua said.

The area along the Yellow River has rolling hills of loose soil blown south from the Gobi desert. Thunderstorms have loosened the terraced hillsides that were made unstable by the quake.

About 123 000 people were affected by the quake, with 31 600 moved to temporary shelters, the provincial earthquake administration said on its website. Almost 2 000 homes were destroyed and about 22 500 damaged, it said.

Urban areas where buildings are more solid were spared major damage, unlike the traditional mud and brick homes in the countryside. More

 

Could big bills from extreme weather drive climate action?

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Could the growing costs of damage from extreme weather – in rich countries as well as poor – be the push that finally drives action on climate change?

House inundated by the Elbe river

Worst-in-a-decade flooding that swept through Germany as U.N. climate talks took place there this month will cost Germany’s government and its insurance companies up to $8 billion, experts estimate. In the United States, the bill for recovery from Hurricane Sandy is estimated at more than $50 billion, with agricultural losses from that country’s widespread drought last year even more costly.

“When you add up what all the extreme weather events cost last year (in the United States), it’s in excess of $250 billion,” said Rachel Kyte, vice president for sustainable development at the World Bank. “You’re talking about economic devastation that at some point is going to start hitting.”

So far, such heavy losses have not led to widespread political support for action on climate change in the United States, or other hard-hit countries. But a new report from the World Bank on the expected impacts of climate shifts suggests that so-called “loss and damage” from extreme weather is just starting, and the costs – in lives, economic damage and even potentially political stability – could rise dramatically around the world.

In South Asia, the once-regular Asian monsoon is growing less predictable, leading to deepening concerns that shifts could affect the food security and lives of 1.6 billion people. This year, the monsoon arrived almost a month early, causing severe flooding in some parts of India. At other times it has come late, leading to widespread power blackouts as desperate farmers switch on irrigation pumps, said Erick Fernandes, an adviser on climate change and natural resources for the World Bank.

Worsening drought in the Amazon threatens rainfall in food-producing areas of South America as far south as Argentina, he said, during a seminar on the World Bank report at the offices of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in London.

Brazil’s crops – which are widely exported to other countries as well as feeding Brazilians – are 95 percent rainfed, Fernandes said, and the country relies heavily on hydropower for its energy.

Ocean acidification, as the world’s seas absorb excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, has risen by 30 percent from pre-industrial times, the seminar heard. Acidification could prevent many shellfish from growing shells while an expected global temperature rises of at least 4 degrees Celsius would kill most coral reefs around the world, threatening tourism income and leaving coasts now protected by reefs more vulnerable to storms.

The Caribbean alone earns $5 billion a year from its coral reefs, Fernandes said.

TWO DEGREES HOTTER

Much of southern and southwest Africa is expected to see worsening drought by 2030 that could make growing maize – the region’s staple – impossible in 40 percent of the area it is now cultivated, the report said. Rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is also likely to turn many of Africa’s grass savannahs to brushy woodlands, affecting pastoralists.

In Southeast Asia, where coastal cities are seeing a big population surge, particularly in informal settlements, rising temperatures are expected to make life extremely uncomfortable for those without access to air conditioning, and to drive a serious increase in the severity of storms that could flood homes and workplaces – as happened in Thailand in 2011, said Fernandes.

Such shifts, besides causing huge financial losses, are likely to force a complete revamp of existing development plans.

“The development paradigm we’ve been peddling for years, that it’s easier to deal with the poor in urban settings than rural, because they’re easier to find and reach with services” may now be wrong, Kyte said.

“This report says that perhaps the most dangerous place to be if you’re poor is in the slums of a southeast Asian city.”

Changes are coming faster than expected, Fernandes said, noting that there was now a chance that a 4 degree Celsius rise in temperatures could arrive by 2060, and that “we could experience a 2-degree (hotter) world in our lifetimes”.

The increasingly extreme weather of recent years is the result of a 0.8 degree Celsius rise in the world’s temperature since pre-industrial times, which suggests that “even 2 degrees is not going to be a picnic”, he said.

Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, and a senior fellow at the IIED, said he saw the World Bank report as “all about loss and damage” – a relatively new term that describes the costs associated with failure to reduce or adapt to climate change.

Who might pay those costs remains a huge political question. Rich countries at the U.N. climate talks have so far refused to accept any liability for their higher carbon emissions, fearing it could lead to them having to pay billions in compensation, experts say.

That suggests many countries, companies and communities will be asked to shoulder the rising costs of extreme weather themselves – and those costs could lead to growing pressure for action, experts predicted. More