It will deluge again — and you are still on your own, citizen

East London was thwacked by a ferocious subtropical-fed deluge swinging in off the ocean, adding to the wobbly global weather patterns affecting Eastern Cape people.

Climate change was identified as a core driver of the Durban “rain bomb”, which had similar characteristics, but with far more ferocity, than Monday’s storm, which dumped 65mm in 45 minutes in Gonubie.

There was some confusion at the SA Weather Service’s Eastern Cape offices in Gqeberha when spokesperson Garth Sampson said 86mm fell at Bridledrift Dam 37mm between 7am and 8am, and 71mm at the weather office at King Phalo Airport, of which 38mm was recorded between 7am and 9am.

He explained that there was “convective activity” off East London in which hot and cool air had collided, causing a downpour.

The Dispatch was on Gonubie Point at 7am and experienced how a fetid pillow of air soughing off the ocean from the south east under a darkly layered, ominous cloud turned into a deluge when the southwesterly wind came.

This reporter’s rain gauge took 45 minutes from 8.15am to 8.45 to record 65mm and this rose to 75mm in the next hour.

Residents reported homes being flooded and there was mayhem in the metro’s lowlying areas, many of them where shacks are built.

Weather apps, like Windy.com and Windguru, showed a sudden arrival of a subtropical-fed low pressure system.

Winds of more than 90km/h were recorded on the Zephyrfree wind app, and the CSIR’S Wavenet buoy off the port shot up to 93km/h from 19km/h.

Windy.com, used by water users of all ilk in East London, showed an intense low pressure ball of cool air being fed tonnes of warm marine moisture from a high pressure system stretching across the subtropical Indian Ocean and down to Western Australia.

Three of these subtropical storms have hit the city in a year and have been placed in the same category as the April 11 Durban “rain bomb” which killed 259 people there, and two in the Eastern Cape.

This storm was a cut-off-low system fed by subtropical air coming from far.

Other subtropical- moisturefuelled storms in East London this year were:

● On Saturday, January 8, eight people died, one of them the revered K9 search and rescue police officer Captain Pierre Marx, 53, who drowned during a rescue in Nahoon River.

The provincial death toll was 21.

The weekend storms seemed to thunder in from all angles, from the sea, from the interior, and;

● On Monday, August 8, at 5.15am, there was no warning when a gust front travelling at the speed of a 126km/h category 1 hurricane came in off the sea and smashed into Buffalo City and nearby coastline, ripping off roof sheeting and blowing down walls.

The SA Weather Service was predicting a fresh breeze.

Though the service has designed a new weather-warning system which runs from green level one to red level 10, with pull-down menus of the expected impacts, the service was found to be woefully out of kilter in the 350mm Durban deluge, which made global headlines.

On April 12, as the dead and dying lay buried in mudslides, drowned or electrocuted, the weather service issued a statement suggesting there was not enough data and emphatically stating that it could not say this was a climate breakdown event.

Ironically, it is the weather service which is the custodian of climate data.

Thirty-one days later, a 31page rapid science research paper produced by the global World Weather Attribution (WWA) group shamed the SA Weather Service for poor dissemination of the looming disaster, saying the official warnings had “limited reach” and people who did receive them may not known what to do based on them.

The WWA team of 27 climate scientists from 14 climate system centres, institutes, weather services and disaster centres collaborating under the leadership of the WWA led by Dr Friederike Otto, of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London found that:

● Climate change made the extreme rainfall that caused huge floods in eastern SA heavier and more likely to happen;

● The deluge used to be expected once every 40 years, but human-caused global warming had reduced that to every 20 years, meaning the likelihood of another storm had doubled, and;

● The intensity of the next storm will increase by as much as 8%.

Of significance for the Eastern Cape was the statement that province was in the same “homogenised (common) climate” as Durban, and had the same prognosis.

The WWA team included climatologists from the highly respected Climate System Analysis Group at the University of Cape Town and a brave SA Weather Service meteorologist.

The SA Weather Service did say that: “We can state with confidence that globally (as a direct result of global warming and associated climate change) all forms of severe and extreme weather (such as heatwaves, heavy rain, and coastal storm surge events) are becoming more frequent and more extreme that in the recent past.

“In other words, heavy rain events such as the current incident can rightfully be expected to recur in the future and with increasing frequency.”

The WWA came to its conclusion after looking at many climate data models, peer-reviewed research, high rainfall figures over a two-day period, and did a comparison of what would have happened if the globe had not warmed by 1.2% since industrialisation in the late 1800s.

It said these deluges were ramped up by human greenhouse gas emissions.

“As the atmosphere becomes warmer it can hold more water, increasing the risk of downpours,” it said.

“With further greenhouse gas emissions and continued temperature increases heavy rainfall episodes will become even more common and intense.”

Otto, who is a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report, stated: “Most people who died in the floods lived in informal settlements, so again we are seeing how climate change disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable people.

Dr Izidine Pinto, of the Climate System Analysis Group and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said: “If we do not reduce emissions and keep global temperatures below 1.5ºc, many extreme weather events will become increasingly destructive.

“We need to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to a new reality where floods and heatwaves are more intense and damaging.”

He said it was “sometimes a challenge” to disseminate early warnings to all citizens, and it required improved collaboration with other government departments and organs of state as well as private stakeholders.