Borrasca bautizada por el IPMA portugues que cruzo la peninsula tras el paso de Ciaran, con lluvias generalizadas y vientos muy fuertes.
2 fallecidos en Portugal, decenas de miles de hogares sin luz, danos en infraestructuras.
Domingos arrived barely three days after Ciarán, over ground that was already soaked. That is the figure that matters and the one no pressure chart shows: the same amount of rain on saturated ground produces far more runoff than on dry ground. It came in from the west towards Portugal and Galicia with strong southerly winds and unloaded on the Rías Baixas one of the most intense accumulated-rainfall episodes in the series at Vigo.
The figures that follow are not estimates and have not been copied from any bulletin: they were computed on ERA5, the European Centre’s reanalysis, at a point representative of the area affected — Vigo — and compared with the 29 complete years of the series. What matters is not the number but the rank.
| Variable | During the episode | Rank in the series |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum pressure | 995.3 hPa | falls in the most extreme 1 % of the series of the 254,208 hours measured |
| Maximum 10 m wind | 53 km/h | falls in the most extreme 0.1 % of the series of the 254,208 hours |
| Rainfall over 3 days | 130.2 mm | falls in the most extreme 1 % of the series of the 10,590 3-day windows |
| Minimum temperature | 9.6 °C | does not particularly stand out in the series of the 254,208 hours |
At this point, what was exceptional about Domingos was the wind and the accumulated rainfall. The other variables stayed within what this place sees with some regularity. To place the rainfall: the wettest 3-day episode recorded at Vigo in the whole series was 170.6 mm, on 22 October 1999.
ERA5 works with cells of about 28 kilometres and smoothed terrain. It describes the air mass well and allows one storm to be compared with another on the same yardstick, which is precisely what cannot be done with station records that have changed site. What it does not see is the detail: a storm that unloads over one particular ravine is averaged across a cell of 800 square kilometres, and that is why its totals are always lower than those of a well-sited rain gauge. For the official figures of an episode, AEMET is the authority.
Data: ERA5 · Copernicus Climate Data Store, CC-BY licence. Sources and methodology →
