Wow. Just, Wow.
Click here to see the full effect.
Produced by the Environment Agency and available on the Somerset Newsroom site.
I need to be clear here – the map shows the geographical extent of the low-lying land known as the Somerset Levels and Moors and is related to proposals from various agencies for future management of the area, including the potential for flooding. It is not – and I apologise to anyone who thought it was – a map of the current extent of flooding.
The recent debates and arguments about flooding on the Somerset Levels have been all about getting the floodwater off the levels, or using dredging to reduce the rate at which the waters rise once they reach them. The problem is, the present analysis completely ignores that:
To illustrate the first point, a paper by Tim Osborn and Douglas Maraun from the UEA’s Climate Research Unit reviewed the changing intensity of rainfall over Britain and concluded, in relation to winter rainfall,
River flooding, however, typically occurs after a number of days of heavy rainfall. To assess whether multi-day precipitation has changed, we counted how many days each winter fell at the end of a 5-day spell of “very wet” weather. Figure 3 shows that this has also increased, when averaged over the UK.
Map from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Somerset_Levels.png