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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

‘Tropical’ rain baffled meteorologists

It’s been an unusually cold and wet summer in Norway this year, but the rain that hammered down on a small village in the county of Nord-Trøndelag early this week left state meteorologists all but speechless.

“This just doesn’t happen in Norway, we have difficulty believing it’s true,” meteorologist Geir Ottar Fagerli told state broadcaster NRK on Tuesday, after 102 millimeters of rain drenched Ogndal in Nord-Trøndelag in the course of just an hour. “It’s not that we don’t believe the observations, but it’s just incredible.”

Fagerli said the sudden and heavy rainfall resembled weather patterns in the tropics, not in north-central Norway.

“These are the quantities that fall in a jungle, while in Norway we have had unofficial records of 80 to 90 millimeters, but that’s seldom,” Fagerlig said. “I have never heard of quantifies over 100.”

Kristin Wåtland Delbekk, a farmer in Ogndal, had never experienced anything like it either.

“I have lived here for 28 years, but the rain just poured down in buckets,” Delbekk told NRK. “And then we got huge hailstones. Right after that, there was a layer of ice over everything. The cows were really disturbed, and some wouldn’t go outdoors again after they’d been milked. This was new for them, too.”

Fagerli described it as “extremely extreme weather,” with the quantity of rain setting “a solid, if unofficial, record in Norway.” The rain damaged crops, rutted fields, swept away a concrete bridge and left roads covered with mud and debris.

“It’s just crazy here,” local resident Pål Malmo told NRK. “I have never seen anything like it.”

newsinenglish.no/Nina Berglund

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