In a single day, an average 93 millimeters of rain fell near Germany’s Ahr and Erft rivers; in just two days, 106 millimeters of rain fell in Belgium’s Meuse River region. With many river measurement stations destroyed, the researchers focused on assessing the contribution of climate change to the intense rainfall using climate simulations comparing conditions with and without human-caused climate change.
That intense rainfall might occur once every 400 years under current climate conditions, but those odds are likely to increase as the world continues to warm, said coauthor Maarten van Aalst on August 23 at a news conference on the report. It’s “still a rare event, but a rare event we should prepare for,” said van Aalst, a climate and disaster risk researcher at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and the director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.
That intense rainfall might occur once every 400 years under current climate conditions, but those odds are likely to increase as the world continues to warm, said coauthor Maarten van Aalst on August 23 at a news conference on the report. It’s “still a rare event, but a rare event we should prepare for,” said van Aalst, a climate and disaster risk researcher at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and the director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.
