Borrasca profunda con caracter casi tropical que afecto a Canarias e impacto luego al sur peninsular con lluvias torrenciales.
1 fallecido en Canarias, olas de mas de 8 metros, inundaciones en zonas costeras del archipielago.
Karlotta dropped south across the Atlantic to low latitudes and affected the Canaries, Madeira, the Gulf of Cádiz and the Atlantic coast of Morocco, a more southerly track than usual. In February, with the Atlantic at its coldest, these depressions generate less convection but far more wave fetch: what reaches the coast is a long groundswell, able to cross a thousand kilometres without losing energy.
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 — the Gulf of Cádiz — and compared with the 30 complete years of the series. What matters is not the number but the rank.
| Variable | During the episode | Rank in the series |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum pressure | 995.5 hPa | falls in the most extreme 1 % of the series of the 262,992 hours measured |
| Maximum 10 m wind | 40 km/h | falls in the most extreme 0.1 % of the series of the 262,992 hours |
| Rainfall over 5 days | 51.5 mm | falls in the most extreme 5 % of the series of the 10,954 5-day windows |
| Minimum temperature | 9.2 °C | does not particularly stand out in the series of the 262,992 hours |
At this point, what was exceptional about Karlotta was the wind. The other variables stayed within what this place sees with some regularity. To place the rainfall: the wettest 5-day episode recorded at the Gulf of Cádiz in the whole series was 190.0 mm, on 21 December 2009.
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 →
