This spring is the sunniest on record, and there
is more sunshine to come
The official shortage of rain water – measured at 13
weather stations nationwide – is currently 133 millimetres, and that could
increase to 170 mm in the coming two weeks, according to calculations by KNMI.
Society
May 26, 2020
There may
be a few days still to go, but the meteorological spring of 2020 is set to go
down on record as the sunniest on record, according to weather bureau
Weerplaza. With more sunshine forecast up to the end of the month, the period
March to May is likely to have seen 50 more hours of sunshine than average,
placing 2020 at the top of the record lists, Weerplaza said. On average, there
are 560 hours of sunshine in spring, but this year so far, there have been 713,
and that means the old record set in 2011 has already been broken, weather
forecaster Henk Luntz said. Research by national weather bureau KNMI and
Utrecht University shows that Dutch summers have become drier inland since
1950. This means farmers will have to learn to deal with this increase in
summer droughts, the researchers say. The official shortage of rain water –
measured at 13 weather stations nationwide – is currently 133 millimetres, and
that could increase to 170 mm in the coming two weeks, according to
calculations by KNMI. This means farmers may have to buy feed for their dairy
cows because of a shortage of grass, boosting milk prices. Farmers may also be
banned from using water in rivers and ditches to spray their crops and, if
river levels drop too much, inland shipping will also be disrupted. So far
there is little change in the weather on the way. The coming Whitsun weekend
will be warm and sunny, with the best of the weather forecast for Monday, June
1, when temperatures could top 25 degrees nationwide. The KNMI’s long-range
forecast says there is a 60% chance of the same sort of weather continuing well
into June.
Read more
at DutchNews.nl:
DROUGHT IN EASTERN NETHERLANDS LINKED TO CLIMATE
CHANGE: STUDY
By Janene
Pieters on May 26, 2020 - 09:12
While
scientists were initially reluctant to link the Netherlands' record dry summer
in 2018 to climate change, a study by meteorological institute KNMI and Utrecht
University showed that global warming was behind the drought, but only in
Eastern Netherlands, NU.nl reports.
Climate
models are very clear about what the Netherlands can expect in the future.
Winters will get more westerly winds and more rain, summers will be hotter and
drier. The droughts will have two main causes - increased evaporation as a
direct result of the rising temperatures, and likely also longer consecutive
periods without rain as a result of an increase in summer high pressure areas
above the North Sea.
In the
record dry summer of 2018 KNMI was reluctant to link the drought to global
warming, because while the Dutch winters were already milder and wetter, and
summers were noticeably hotter, summer downpours were also rising. But a
further investigation launched with Utrecht University now showed that the 2018
drought could indeed be linked to global warming, albeit only regionally.
In the
eastern half of the Netherlands, including the area that was most affected by
the drought in 2018, there is a trend towards more drought, research leader
Sjouke Philip said to NU.nl. "It is not driven by changing rainfall, but
by the rising temperature and therefore increased evaporation." Extreme
droughts are now more common in the eastern half of the Netherlands than in the
middle of the last century. This year the meteorological summer started out
even drier than in 2018.
But that is
not the case for the coastal region. In a narrow strip of 50 kilometers along
the coast, the net amount of summer rain increased slightly. This is not a
consequence of global warming, but a factor that locally compensated for the
extra evaporation. The drought effect of climate change is therefore not yet
visible in the coastal regions.
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