By Paul Homewood
Hebden Bridge and other towns in the Calder Valley have been hit by flooding again, and inevitably the finger has been pointed at “climate change”
On Look North last night I watched BBC weatherman Paul Hudson reeling off the usual claim that warmer air can hold more moisture, blah blah.
According to the EA, rainfall on Sunday was up to 100mm in the catchment area. However, this is pretty meaningless, as we are talking about upland moors over 1000 ft in altitude. Moreover, the EA now has many measuring devices in areas never before recorded, purely for flood forecasting rather than climate. It is therefore impossible to make any long term comparisons. In any event, 100mm of rain in a day in locations such as this are perfectly normal occurrences.
So, is there any evidence that daily rainfall is becoming more extreme in the area, or is 100mm actually a common event?
We have two long running weather stations in the region with daily rainfall data, courtesy of KNMI. (Data is up to 2017). Neither show any evidence of daily rainfall becoming more extreme:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectdailyseries.cgi?id=someone@somewhere
Neither station is ideal for representing the Calder Valley catchment area. Bradford, though nearby, is to the east of the Pennines, which feed the Calder. Newton Rigg is on the west of the Pennines, but a bit further north in Cumbria.
Nevertheless if the extreme rainfall theory is correct, we would expect to see its effect at both locations. After all, I am sure that global warming does not just affect the Calder Valley!
Hebden Bridge is a notoriously vulnerable area for flooding, as it is located in a steep sided valley where three rivers meet – River Calder, Hebden Water and Colden Clough.
The Flood Chronologies website gives details on some of the historical floods there. I have listed some of the more notable ones below:
Just look at that last one again – 193mm of rain in two hours! You clearly do not have to invoke a “warmer atmosphere” to explain heavy rainfall.
Questions have also been raised about the poor state of drainage up stream:
Barry Greenwood, 73, from Hebden Bridge, saw his daughter’s hair salon flooded again when the Calder burst.
He said: “I’ve been hitting my head against a stone wall. The problem is that the drainage systems on the moorland have all collapsed.
“You’ve got the uplands areas filling up with water, they’re not draining during the dry periods because the drains are completely knackered, the catchment that they run into has fallen into disrepair and we are getting all this water. (The Environment Agency) has taken houses off people and demolished them, they are widening the river system where it isn’t necessary, they haven’t reinstated the overspill aqueducts. The list is horrendous.”
But blaming floods on climate change saves the Environment Agency the bother of actually doing anything about it.
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February 11, 2020 at 08:11AM
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