While inland areas have been hit by inland river flooding fairly often in recent times, the past couple of months has seen both the East and West coast of the country affected by coastal flooding.
While we have experienced an attack of depressions for a number of weeks now, the severity of these hitting our shores has not been too dissimilar to events in the past.
So why have these past two months seen some destruction around popular areas of our coasts.
It's the combination of these winds with very high tides of course, but got me thinking why don't we experience more frequent events such as these.
Since seeing the Severn Bore in the seventies, I have received timetables for the wave each year and now view these in recent times when they are published on the internet. The timetable is a good guide of when the country will see the highest tides, as only these generate a bore at certain times during the year.
I've always thought what would happen to the height of the bore if this coincided with deep low pressure and subsequent SW winds from the Atlantic. While I feel for those affected, I have found these past two days fascinating to see what happens and the effect. The river has been running high with freshwater levels from all the rain, but a bore has still been generated and the following tide after one of these yesterday was enough to breach defences.
In all, I have found since the seventies that the large bores generally occur coincidentally when high pressure is over the country, and very little problems occur.
These coastal flooding events in past two months have occurred as a result of coinciding with very high tides, so I do wonder if we have been in fact fairly lucky if that's the word up to now.
While the recent coastal flooding has occurred when 3 star bores have been forecast, in early Feb and early March there is the prospect of 5 star bores (very rare to have two) which means the tides will be higher still than now. Just hope those areas affected can rebuild before these occur and if strong winds combine at the same time.
Edited by user
04 January 2014 20:23:02
|
Reason: Not specified