Anomalous atmospheric events leading to Kyushu’s flash floods, July 11–14, 2012

Weili Duan (), Bin He (), Kaoru Takara, Pingping Luo, Daniel Nover, Yosuke Yamashiki and Wenrui Huang

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2014, vol. 73, issue 3, 1255-1267

Abstract: During July 11–14, 2012, deadly floods and landslides triggered by a series of unprecedented heavy rains hit Kyushu, Japan, causing at least 32 deaths and around 400,000 evacuations. We focus on synoptic anomalies identified after inspecting rainfall patterns and documenting the conditions associated with this tragic event using data combined from the Global Rainfall Map in Near Real Time data, the NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis dataset, and the global forecast system. Rainfall maps indicated that there were many heavy rains in Kyushu in these days and this disaster was associated with the pattern of forecasts and standardized anomalies. A weather trough with positive height anomalies appeared, the center of which moved to the north of Japan over this period, which might cause wind anomalies and whereby lots of water vapor were transported to Kyushu area with up to 90 m s −1 , and high values of precipitable water formed with up to 60 mm. These results suggest that a larger-scale pattern is conducive for heavy rainfall and the anomalies put the pattern in context as to the potential for an extreme rainfall event, which can provide insights and methods for predicting extreme events’ or something similar. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Keywords: Kyushu flash floods; Synoptic climatology; Atmospheric anomalous; Reanalysis data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-014-1134-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:73:y:2014:i:3:p:1255-1267

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-014-1134-3

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().