Valencia meets Asheville.
The pictures look like out-takes from a lost Mad Max movie.
More rain coming.
Australian Broadcasting Company:
Valencia alone recorded a death toll of 92 after receiving what Spain’s weather service said was more rain in eight hours than it had received in the last 20 months.
But are torrential downpours just another act of nature — unavoidable and inevitable?
Scientists say a warming planet is at play, and extreme weather events are occurring more frequently and in much greater strength than ever before.
What’s behind the deadly floods?
Spain’s flash floods were caused by a destructive weather system in which cold and warm air meet and produce powerful rain clouds, a pattern believed to be becoming more prevalent due to climate change.
The phenomenon is known locally as DANA, a Spanish acronym for high-altitude isolated depression, and unlike common storms or squalls it can form independently of polar or subtropical jet streams.
When cold air blows over warm Mediterranean waters it causes hotter air to rise quickly and form dense, water-laden clouds that can remain over the same area for many hours, raising their destructive potential.
The event sometimes provokes large hail storms and tornadoes as seen this week, according to meteorologists.
Eastern and southern Spain are particularly susceptible to the phenomenon due to its position between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Warm, humid air masses and cold fronts meet in a region where mountains favour the formation of storm clouds and rainfall.
Spain has experienced similar autumn storms in recent years, though nothing compared to the devastation over the last two days, which recalls floods in Germany and Belgium in 2021 in which 230 people were killed.
It is possibly the nation’s worst in its modern history as the number of victims surpassed 87 people killed in a 1996 flood near the town of Biescas in the Pyrenees mountains.
In 1957, dozens of people died in floods in the city of Valencia which led to the construction of a new course of the Turia river to prevent floods in the city centre.
“Events of this type, which used to occur many decades apart, are now becoming more frequent and their destructive capacity is greater,” said Ernesto Rodriguez Camino, a member of the Spanish Meteorological Society.
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Bright spot, at least the reporting, from DW at top of page, and CBS below, puts the disaster in proper climate change context.