A weather anniversary - 50 years ago today

[Julian Mayes]

It seemed a rather odd situation this afternoon (Sunday) to be having to water the garden again under more or less cloudless skies and in bright, warm sunshine when 50 years ago today, flood water started pouring across my garden and then through the house, reaching a depth of several feet. This was long before I lived here, I might add. The South East England floods of September 1968 seem to have passed without comment but were catastrophic for the town of Molesey where I live as well as places such as Guildford and Tonbridge. Most roads here were flooded with water depths appraently reaching 6-8 feet locally. A slow-moving but re-invigorating frontal system moved backwards and forwards over South East England over the 14th and 15th Sept. The Medway and Mole catchments to the south of london were worst hit, the waters in the Mole overtopping the river and forming a huge lake between Esher, Hersham and Molesey - but coming in Molesey's direction. Local rainfall was not that exceptional (just under 25mm on the 14th, 55mm on the 15th) but it reached 175-200mm over the two days from mid Surrey, west Kent and through to southernmost Essex. This was not flash flooding - the waters rose slowly and this seems to highlight a lack of emergency planning and preparedness, though many householders were used to flooding and responded accordingly. 

Some members of this ng may remember or know of the event. It is certainly remembered by older members of the Molesey community. The 40th anniversary was commemorated by a meeting and an exhibition by the Molesey Local History Society, a meeting that was responsible for getting the society off the ground so successfully. The meeting was hugely oversubscribed. A 50th anniversary meeting is planned with over 200 people expected to turn out on a dark November evening. A further meeting on the aftermath is to be held next year, including the Mole flood prevention scheme. The response is truly impressive and the impact of the flooding is still remembered vividly. 

Julian

[quaesoveritas (Whitley Bay)]

No doubt, if such weather occurred today, it would be blamed on "climate change" by the media.

[Metman2012]

Have you seen this link Julian? There also this one as well (but it requires a lot of scrolling to get to the 14th etc.). I had forgotten this but now remember that the Mole caused quite a lot of problems. I was living further north in Wallington at the time and quite often went to that neck of the woods. I was working at Kew then too - I wonder if i did any of the obs on those days!

[Julian Mayes]

Metman2012,  many thanks for the links.   Digitisation of the DWR and also of British Rainfall makes us appreciate what excellent resources they were - and are. I was unaware that one of special event weather summary pages had been prepared for that date - a neat summary. The BR for 1968 .....

https://digital.nmla.metoffice.gov.uk/archive/sdb%3Acollection%7C5470d19c-4866-40fc-9ae9-7dcb2fc0f823/

was, of course the last one, and includes an article at the back on the exceptional rainfall events of the year. There are also the usual detailed maps of daily rainfall on 14th and 15th Sept. A huge loss that it ended - I wonder if people then imagined that you could somehow put information onto computers that people could have in their homes - without the need for costly publishing? What a great invention that would be.  If you could do this, surely it would be possible to bring the publication back. 

What a contrast to today with the north-west / south-east weather contrast working the other way around. 

Julian  

[Tudor Hughes]

      I remember the event fairly well, living where I do now on the border between Surrey and Gtr London.  Flooding here, except for small areas such as dips in the road, is  virtually impossible.  From British Rainfall I'd estimate the 2-day fall here to be about 175 mm, which exceeds nearly all my monthly recorded totals, starting 1983.  There was a lot of thunder and lightning associated with this event.  I remember reading that the newly-opened Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford was flooded to a depth of ten feet.

Tudor Hughes, Warlingham, Surrey, 557 ft, 170 m.

[Tudor Hughes]

   Some years ago Bob Pritchard made the remark that the entire circulation for most of 1968 was very anomalous and if it had occurred in (say) 2000 the media, and not just the media, would have gone completely potty.  I am pretty certain Bob Pritchard is not a "climate change denier" but he was making the point that in any distribution exceptional events will occur, such as men of 6ft 6in and wins for Tottenahm Hotspur.

Tudor Hughes

[Will Hand]

Yes 1968 was anomalous. But CC is playing a part now. To get really severe weather in the UK you need injections of high PV from polar regions. Melt the ice and there are less opportunities for this. Not impossible to get another 1968 type setup but less likely nowadays. Our weather is slowly, slowly becoming more benign and tends to get "stuck in a rut". 

[Julian Mayes]

Plenty of food for thought in Will's comment. Decades ago when I was looking at synoptic type changes I looked at the annual surface pressure anomalies across the UK for about 50 years. Two years stood out as having a very diminished N - S gradient - 1968 and 1969. At that time we referred to a period of enhanced blocking with a dry anomaly in the north-west and wetter in the south-east, as in 1968. Nowadays we often seem to have blocking (at least in terms of a large amplitude Rossby wave pattern) but this does not so often seem to lead to surface winds from an easterly component, possibly because of the frequency of the upper ridge over central Europe / trough over mid North Atlantic, much as we've had recently. I'll stop there or else I'll start one of my rants about being worried about future rainfall in the South East under climate change (or "climate change").