Flood Events Topics

70 inches of rain fell in Japan in just days - could this be a sign of something else?

7/21/2018

In the last two weeks, Japan has been inundated with rainfall totaling over 70 inches in areas over the extreme southwestern part of the country. This has been cited as one of worst flooding disasters to ever occur there. The flooding rains have lead to numerous landslides as well as rivers overflowing their banks which has caused immense damage to cities and villages. The death toll has risen to 200 and continues to rise by the day, with another 54 people that remain unaccounted for. The Hiroshima and Okayama Prefecture areas took the brunt of the storms, with rainfall rates exceeding three inches per hour at times. Japan’s Shikoku Island was also hit hard. The Associated Press reported that 10.4 inches of rain accumulated in its Kochi Prefecture in just three hours, with more than 70 inches of rain totaling at the end of the storm system. The World Meteorological Organization reports that the total precipitation at many of the observation sites reached two to upwards of four times the annual mean which also happens to be the monthly precipitation for the month of July in southwestern Japan.

Japan is no stranger to natural disasters, with the catastrophic tsunami in 2011 that caused the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The scenes of the flooded landscapes with rooftops just barely visible this past week eerily resembles the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami.

In the case of this storm, the torrential rainfall can be blamed on a combination of events occurring. Tropical moisture was pulled north, colliding with the remnants of Typhoon Prapiroon as well as colliding with a front stalled over Japan. While uncommon to occur, the atmospheric conditions were just right in this case, creating multiple storms behind the parent thunderstorms. This process had the storms lining up and inundating the same region over and over, causing the massive landslides and flooding to occur instantaneously.

While natural disasters are bound to happen throughout the world even without climate change existing, the continuous acknowledgment as well as educating others on this matter will really make a difference on tackling these problems in the world.

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©2018 Weather Forecaster Michael Ames

3 Comments

Douglas Tanner

7/25/2018 08:29:42 am

It sounds like the perfect storm in regards to the compounding of atmospheric parameters with awful consequences for Japan.

What you see depends upon how you look, that is, what you are looking at is you ( your psychological stance ). If one sees the 70 inches of rain as an extreme precipitation event expected when applying the Clausius/Clapeyron Relationship, then the cause is Anthropogenic Climate Change. If an individual takes in the extreme precipitation events in Japan & the East coast U.S. as, wow I'm glad it didn't happen to us...in our little bubble of weather about our home, then there's no eagerness to consider changing to renewable energy sources.

Average individuals do not normally acknowledge a problem and begin to deal with it until within a crisis ( not when they're on the doorstep of a crisis ). My guess is that most climate change denier(s) haven't taken college physics or even high school physics, so it is not real for them.

These events are not primarily " Natural Events " they are man made, we are shooting ourselves in the foot.

Jordan Rabinowitz

8/2/2018 09:28:17 pm

No doubt about it that perspective makes everything relative, but the magnitude of the flooding which occurred over in Japan was beyond impressive even based upon regional rainfall climatological data for that part of the world.

8/7/2018 10:44:39 am

Unfortunately for the planet's inhabitants, down to the base of our living web, the extreme weather events will become more frequent, intense and longer in duration. I feel that individuals & societal groups will become systematically disadvantaged to the inherent vulnerability potential of climate change, such as, the British island of Barbuda in summer of 2017. The entire island had to be evacuated after the hurricane. It was deemed uninhabitable.

If you haven't had the opportunity to read, "Climate Science Special Report 2017", I would recommend it. Just about everything they forecasted to happen has already happened. It is about 477 pages long, well worth the time spent.

The more we decide to mitigate the causes of climate change, the less human beings will have to adapt and/or suffer. The more we mitigate and adapt, the ( less ) suffering will be experienced. I have wished we would have started 25 years ago. We do not know as yet, the magnitude of the momentum of the positive feedback mechanism of climate change and the extreme weather that is to come.

70 inches of rain fell in Japan in just days - could this be a sign of something else?

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