Category: Drought

Posted on in Drought, United Kingdom

Climate update : Half of Britain now officially in drought

The Thames Barrier is one of the flood risk ma...
The Thames Barrier is one of the flood risk management installations operated by the Environment Agency (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Water shortages set to continue until next year following a predicted third dry winter. The Independent reports

Half of Britain is now officially in drought, in the worst national water shortage since 1976 – a situation that may last until Christmas or beyond.

Seventeen more counties have been given drought status, meaning the Midlands and South-west have been added to the already-drought-stricken South-east and East Anglia. England is water-stressed south-east of a line from Yorkshire to Herefordshire.

The map of Britain is now divided sharply in two by water problems, with Wales and the North-west remaining drought-free, but the rest of the country facing increasing difficulty with river flows and very low levels of groundwater. Seven water companies, led by Thames Water with 8.8 million customers in London and the Thames Valley, have had hosepipe bans in place since the Easter weekend.

The Environment Agency said public water supplies in the newly affected areas are unlikely to be restricted this summer, but the lack of rain is beginning to take its toll on the environment and farmers – causing problems for wildlife, wetlands and crop production.

In the Midlands, agency staff have been rescuing fish from the river Lathkill in the Derbyshire Peak District after it partly ran dry and the rivers Tern, Sow, Soar and Leadon reached their lowest recorded levels in history in March.

In the South-west, rivers are also suffering. About 20 million litres a day are being pumped into local river catchments to top up the low flows by Wessex Water.

The Environment Agency says it has no plans to impose restrictions on use, such as hosepipe bans, but it is urging its customers to save water as much as possible. The Wessex region has had below-average rainfall during the winter, but reservoir storage is “satisfactory” and on average reservoirs are about 85 per cent full. But groundwater levels in the aquifers from which Wessex abstracts water are below average for the time of year.

The Agency is warning that the drought could last beyond Christmas. While rain over the spring and summer will help to water crops and gardens, it is unlikely to improve the underlying situation. “A longer-term drought, lasting until Christmas and perhaps beyond, now looks more likely, and we are working with businesses, farmers and water companies to plan ahead to meet the challenges of a continued drought,” Trevor Bishop, the Environment Agency’s head of water resources, said.

It was hoped that a prolonged period of rainfall between last October and March would prevent widespread drought, but parts of England received less than 60 per cent of the average winter rainfall.

There are hopes that a steady rainy winter in 2012-13 will restore rivers and groundwaters, but the Agency is taking no chances and is working with the water industry to put plans in place to deal with the prospect of a third dry winter.

Water companies are looking at options including sharing water across company boundaries.

Fish rescued as celebrated trout river runs dry

Fisheries staff from the Environment Agency have been rescuing trout from one of England’s most celebrated trout streams after its levels fell dangerously low. They have been saving the fish in the river Lathkill in the Peak District, a river which is small and less than seven miles long (it flows into the Derbyshire Wye) but celebrated because of its water quality. As it flows through a limestone landscape, the Lathkill’s waters are so unusually clear that its trout can be seen from one bank to the other, but the drought has exposed sections of the river bed.

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Posted on in British, China, Climate, Climate change, Comments, Cyclone, Drought, Floods

Are climate events Nature’s way to tell us something…. I say ‘yes’!

MY COMMENT: I am not one for scaremongering (eg. 2012 was I believe non-sense), however recent climatic events – flooding in Australia followed by massive, record-breaking cyclones in that country; current droughts in China; floods in Pakistan… All these make me wonder: Is nature adjusting itself in a ‘feedback loop’ and should be more aware/start to take positive action to adjust ‘our’ , human ways?  Two stories from today’s newspapers suggest the answer is ‘yes’…

From the Independent

British floods result of climate change

The catastrophic floods of autumn 2000, which saw river levels reach 400-year highs and left 10,000 homes underwater across England and Wales, were most likely the result of global warming.

** Full article below

From The International Herald Tribune

Heavy rains linked to humans

An increase in heavy precipitation that has afflicted many countries is at least partly a consequence of human influence on the atmosphere, climate scientists reported in a new study.

** Full article below

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/british-floods-were-the-result-of-climate-change-2217146.html

The catastrophic floods of autumn 2000, which saw river levels reach 400-year highs and left 10,000 homes underwater across England and Wales, were most likely the result of global warming.

It is the first time scientists have been able to plot with any confidence the link between the extreme weather with man-made greenhouse gases. Researchers from Oxford University and the Met Office aided by thousands of volunteers online believe 20th-century industrial emissions made the natural disaster almost twice as likely.

While environmentalists have long pointed to the floods as early evidence of the impact man is having on the environment, concrete proof has been harder to find.

But Dr Pardeep Pall, who began the research while a doctoral student at Oxford University’s Department of Physics, said this has now changed. “This study is the first of its kind to model explicitly how such rising greenhouse gas concentrations increase the odds of a particular type of flood event in the UK, and is the first to use publicly volunteered computer time to do so,” he said.

In mid-October 2000, parts of Kent and Sussex were under water when the Ouse at Lewes burst its banks, along with the Uck at Uckfield and the Medway at Tonbridge in Kent. A few weeks later it was Yorkshire’s turn with the Ouse in York reaching its highest level since 1600 while the Severn at Worcester and Shrewsbury recorded its biggest flood since 1947.

The Thames, Trent, Wharfe and Dee also flowed after much of the country suffered its wettest autumn since records began. The final insurance bill for the damage was £1.3bn with motorways closed, train services cancelled and power supplies disrupted.

The research, published in Nature, reveals there was a two-in-three chance that the odds of flooding that year were increased by global warming by a factor of two or more. While unable to rule out the possibility that the floods could have happened even if the atmosphere had been unpolluted by greenhouse gases in preceding decades, scientists believe the study brings them closer to being able to work out the real-time impact of climate change rather than the long-term predictions which are normally used. Experts could soon be able to tell almost immediately whether an event was caused by the effects of man or not.

Researchers used a Met Office computer climate model to simulate the weather of autumn 2000 both as it was and how it might have been without the presence of man-made CO2. Volunteers around the world then repeated the experiment thousands of times by logging on to the website ClimatePrediction.net. The data was then fed into a flood model by Risk Management Solutions, which develops risk models for the insurance industry.

It was concluded that the chances of floods occurring in autumn 2000 had increased by more than 20 per cent; and perhaps as much as 90 per cent.

Professor Myles Allen, a co-author of the paper, said while scientists had been more easily able to link climate change to the European heatwave of 2003 – an event which resulted in 40,000 deaths, drought, fires and crop failure – establishing the link to floods had been a longer process. He said: “Whether or not a flood occurs in any given year is still an act of God but with the help of thousands of volunteers we are beginning to see how human influence on climate may be starting to load God’s dice.”

The research will be cited today by Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Chris Huhne in an address at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) calling for closer co-operation between governments to reduce emissions and cope with the effects of a changing atmosphere. He will say: “The evidence for human influence on climate is now even more compelling. Climate change is not a distant threat, it is a clear and present danger – and one that we can do something about.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/science/earth/17extreme.html?_r=1&ref=science

In the first major paper of its kind, the researchers used elaborate computer programs that simulate the climate to analyze whether the rise in severe rainstorms, heavy snowfalls and similar events could be explained by natural variability in the atmosphere. They found that it could not, and that the increase made sense only when the computers factored in the effects of greenhouse gases released by human activities like the burning of fossil fuels.

As reflected in previous studies, the likelihood of extreme precipitation on any given day rose by about 7 percent over the last half of the 20th century, at least for the land areas of the Northern Hemisphere for which sufficient figures are available to do an analysis.

The principal finding of the new study is “that this 7 percent is well outside the bounds of natural variability,” said Francis W. Zwiers, a Canadian climate scientist who took part in the research. The paper is being published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature.