Apple donating to relief efforts following Spain's devastating floods

Very nice 👍🏻

“A donation”?  How much exactly?  This isn’t just a crass attempt to use a disaster as a self-promotion opportunity by offering an undisclosed tokenistic donation to undisclosed recipients that people naturally assume to be more generous than it is, is it?  Is one of the beneficiaries The Human Fund?

The images of the aftermath of the flooding are horrifying. Some low lying areas or water collection areas looked like the water got to 10 ft high, with cars on top of cars.

Like with southern Appalachian region and Helene, where the prediction for rain amounts was pretty good 5 to 7 days before they came. It is surely true that weather models were saying this level of rain was coming to these Spanish areas at least 3 to 5 days before they came.

What's pretty common about these disasters is that there is a failure of imagination, from government leaders, weather shows (meteorologists), to the public receiving the news. Most people, a quarter of the people, hear the prediction and don't comprehend what 10 inches of rain over 24 hours mean, and are not reactive to doing something about it.

The government, businesses, should really give people a few days off ahead of time to prepare.

tht said:

The images of the aftermath of the flooding are horrifying. Some low lying areas or water collection areas looked like the water got to 10 ft high, with cars on top of cars.

Like with southern Appalachian region and Helene, where the prediction for rain amounts was pretty good 5 to 7 days before they came. It is surely true that weather models were saying this level of rain was coming to these Spanish areas at least 3 to 5 days before they came.

What's pretty common about these disasters is that there is a failure of imagination, from government leaders, weather shows (meteorologists), to the public receiving the news. Most people, a quarter of the people, hear the prediction and don't comprehend what 10 inches of rain over 24 hours mean, and are not reactive to doing something about it.

The government, businesses, should really give people a few days off ahead of time to prepare.

Those of us who live on the Med in Spain are very used to these situations and they are habitual around this time of year and we even have a non-scientific term for it 'gota fría'.

No current model could foresee the intensity of what hit the Valencia region. That is because the problem isn't what happened (that part was forecast) but the extreme intensity of what happened. 

The nature of these depressions is that they form very quickly and can stay put over an area for prolonged periods of time.

The rising temperature of the Mediterranean Sea is supposedly the root cause of the problem. We expect torrential rain at this time of year. Short but torrential downpours. Flooding is normal. 

I live three hours away from Valencia by car and have been receiving extreme weather warnings from government for three days now. My insurance company has also provided me with all the necessary hotlines and local contacts in readiness for what might come. Everything is on red alert but apart from a storm this morning, nothing has happened - yet.

I check the precipitation radar and I can see the areas around me that are getting rain but the problem is that a storm could simply appear 'out of thin air' with only hours of warning. Unlike a tropical storm, hurricane etc that can be tracked once formed.

Climate change has broken the normal patterns recently. To the point where we desperately need rain but haven't had it for the last four years. 

I see animals coming down from the mountains in summer because there is just no water anywhere. That is not normal. My area is famous for wine, almonds and hazelnuts but farmers were told to let trees die last year as what water reserves there were, were for human consumption.

We've also been lucky that there haven't been any devastating wildfires on a wide scale either.

We have three pumps in our car park but when something like what hit in Valencia happens, all you can do is seal ground level doors and hope all the infrastructure that exists to stop trees and rocks from coming down with the torrents, does its job because we don't only deal with what falls directly on us, but all the accumulated rainfall streaming down from the mountains which typically hits the seafront and rebounds back. 

Of course, those towns around Valencia also had to deal with the cars, street refuse containers and lots more crashing around them. 

And then there are the situations that go overlooked. Most of the reservoirs around here were already mostly empty after a prolonged period of drought but here is a story about a dam that really drives home the magnitude of what happened the other night. 

It is in Spanish so your browser will have to translate it but it's worth a read:https://www.elmundo.es/cronica/2024/10/30/6722960a21efa01b778b459f.html

avon b7 said:

tht said:

The images of the aftermath of the flooding are horrifying. Some low lying areas or water collection areas looked like the water got to 10 ft high, with cars on top of cars.

Like with southern Appalachian region and Helene, where the prediction for rain amounts was pretty good 5 to 7 days before they came. It is surely true that weather models were saying this level of rain was coming to these Spanish areas at least 3 to 5 days before they came.

What's pretty common about these disasters is that there is a failure of imagination, from government leaders, weather shows (meteorologists), to the public receiving the news. Most people, a quarter of the people, hear the prediction and don't comprehend what 10 inches of rain over 24 hours mean, and are not reactive to doing something about it.

The government, businesses, should really give people a few days off ahead of time to prepare.

Those of us who live on the Med in Spain are very used to these situations and they are habitual around this time of year and we even have a non-scientific term for it 'gota fría'.

No current model could foresee the intensity of what hit the Valencia region. That is because the problem isn't what happened (that part was forecast) but the extreme intensity of what happened. 

The nature of these depressions is that they form very quickly and can stay put over an area for prolonged periods of time.

The rising temperature of the Mediterranean Sea is supposedly the root cause of the problem. We expect torrential rain at this time of year. Short but torrential downpours. Flooding is normal. 

I live three hours away from Valencia by car and have been receiving extreme weather warnings from government for three days now. My insurance company has also provided me with all the necessary hotlines and local contacts in readiness for what might come. Everything is on red alert but apart from a storm this morning, nothing has happened - yet.

I check the precipitation radar and I can see the areas around me that are getting rain but the problem is that a storm could simply appear 'out of thin air' with only hours of warning. Unlike a tropical storm, hurricane etc that can be tracked once formed.

Climate change has broken the normal patterns recently. To the point where we desperately need rain but haven't had it for the last four years. 

I see animals coming down from the mountains in summer because there is just no water anywhere. That is not normal. My area is famous for wine, almonds and hazelnuts but farmers were told to let trees die last year as what water reserves there were, were for human consumption.

We've also been lucky that there haven't been any devastating wildfires on a wide scale either.

We have three pumps in our car park but when something like what hit in Valencia happens, all you can do is seal ground level doors and hope all the infrastructure that exists to stop trees and rocks from coming down with the torrents, does its job because we don't only deal with what falls directly on us, but all the accumulated rainfall streaming down from the mountains which typically hits the seafront and rebounds back. 

Of course, those towns around Valencia also had to deal with the cars, street refuse containers and lots more crashing around them. 

And then there are the situations that go overlooked. Most of the reservoirs around here were already mostly empty after a prolonged period of drought but here is a story about a dam that really drives home the magnitude of what happened the other night. 

It is in Spanish so your browser will have to translate it but it's worth a read:

https://www.elmundo.es/cronica/2024/10/30/6722960a21efa01b778b459f.html

I'm happy that you are safe, Avon. And it is very good that you are taking warnings seriously, and tracking the weather. Keep tracking. 

I'm troubled that your meteorology folks did not warn of the intensity of the rain coming. They know the basic atmospheric conditions that generate these torrential rains, and those conditions are a straight line (just physics) for determining the potential intensity of rains to come. I don't think it should have been much of a "surprise" from that point of view. It could be a surprise in the manner that people haven't seen rains like this before, but they should know of rain potentials and intensities many days before it occurs. The modeling is that good, and the risks should have been in the minds of the your meteorologists.

The rest is really communicating the potential of what the data is saying. If they know it is going to be bad, the proper response is to leave for a few days. For government folks, they really should know areas with history of flooding and tell those people to leave. It may turn out to be nothing, people will be angry if it was not much, but that's the better outcome. Leaving doesn't hurt any one. And if it is bad, it's better your stuff is destroyed than you.

Yes, global warming is changing hydrological cycles on a region by region basis. Run the models. Where the predictions are weak is there aren't many models to predict flooding potential, but they will come. The meteorologists should what more rain the experienced before means, too. This isn't a new normal. The GHG emissions that are warming the world haven't stopped increasing. Normal won't be back for at least 150 years, and that is assuming things go well. It's going to be multiple generations of people learning how to deal with global warming.