Climate Change will lead to more extreme rainfall events according to Met Office

On Thursday 11th March the Met Office released a report to say that record-breaking rainfall in the UK is more likely due to climate change, but how much and what is extreme?

Cast your minds back to 3rd of October 2020, Storm Alex battered the UK bringing widespread heavy rainfall

In fact it ended up being the wettest day the UK has ever recorded, and these date back to 1891! The map below shows how much rain fell. The darkest blue is where they saw the most rainfall, but what was exceptional was how widespread the heavy rain was across the UK.

In total 7.4 cubic kilolitres of water fell, that is the equivalent of filling Lochness, the largest lake in the UK.

Since October 2020, the Met Office have done another attribution study. This looks at how likely this rainfall event would be in the natural environment with no human influence...it would happen once in 300 years!

But, due to manmade climate change, we now know that the chances of this event happening today, in our current climate, is once in every 100 years. That's two and a half times more likely.

What's worse is if we continue at the current rate of emissions, by the end of the century it's likey to thappen one in every 30 years, 10 times more likely!

We know that a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and we are set to get more extreme weather as the planet warms. The extremes of very wet and very dry has huge impacts on us in the UK by damaging infrastructure and services impacting our health and our homes.

Climate change is happening at an alarming rate. The time to act is now.

Find out top tips of how you can take steps to lower your impact on the environment visit itv.com/footprint

Together, we can tackle climate change