Climate : rainfall

NOTE : due to lack of time, this topic is not yet complete. However, because it is now one year ago since this happened, I wanted this to go live today...

Here we will be looking at rainfall data. A year ago (end of October 2024) , 229 people died in the Valencian Community (Spain)  as the consequence of a weather phenomenon called DANA. Simplified, this means torrential rainfall caused by cold air coming in contact with the still very warm water of the Mediterranean sea. On this page I will try to analyze rainfall data.

Below is the workflow that will load the rainfall information by weather station. It is quite similar to the Maximum temperature ETL we saw before.

Just to give you an idea of the impact of the DANA, the workflow below takes all the data from the weather station Utiel, which was one of the locations most affected and orders the daily rainfall in descending order.

So you can see that on 29 October 2024 the quantity of rain was 2152. The second highest quantity ever recorded was 736. The units of measure are 0,1 mm . We have data available from 01 Jan 1991 until 30 Sep 2025.

Note that in this top 10 of very heavy rainfall days, 7 are from the year 2010 onwards.

The workflow below selects the rainfall on the date of the DANA (29 Oct 2024) and shows the weather stations where it rained most :

At the TURIS weather station on Oct/29 the rainfall quantity was 710,8 mm.

The all time recorded average is 1,287 mm. So that day it rained 552 times the average quantity, just to give you an idea.

Unlike temperature data, rainfall data is almost impossible to predict. With temperature, if it is very warm HERE, it most likely will also be very warm in the village 5 Km away. With rain, this is not so: I can have a flood here and 5 Km not a drop. So I won't even try. 

In the next workflow however I will show on a map where it rained most on the day of the DANA and compare this to the 'normal' value.