Why are there flash floods leaving catastrophic damage across Europe?
🌀A low-pressure vortex circling over Europe and hemmed in by other weather fronts has triggered the catastrophic flooding in Germany and neighbouring countries
Looming above Germany is a highly charged band of air which has caused record rainfall in western parts of the country.
➡️Meterologists believe the intense weather system may have also caused the flash floods in London telegraph.co.uk/world-news/202…
Weather experts said that rain in Germany over the past 24 hours had been unprecedented.
🌍A near-stationary low-pressure weather system also caused sustained local downpours to the west in France, Belgium and the Netherlands telegraph.co.uk/world-news/202…
🇬🇧What happened in London?
The UK Met Office said the shock downpours in London were likely linked to the weather events in Europe.
The flash flooding was so heavy that almost 100mm of rain fell within a couple of hours
🇩🇪What next?
Forecasters say Germany should be braced for extreme showers over the coming days which will likely lead to rivers overflowing and damage to nearby properties.
Meteorologists predicted further "extreme storms" with peak rainfall possibly reaching 200mm/square meter
🌧️Are extreme weather events becoming more frequent?
Extreme weather events are hitting Europe more frequently as climate change warms the continent, experts agree.
Europe’s average temperature is roughly 2 degrees warmer than it was at the start of the twentieth century
📝A study by the Institute for Technology, Zurich, suggested between 1981-2013, Europe saw a 45% increase in the number of days with heavy rainfall compared to the previous 30 years.
Flooding can also come from rising sea levels, particularly impacting low-lying areas of Europe
❌Globally, sea levels have increased by around 20cm since 1900 - this could jump to 80cm in Europe by the end of the century as global ice caps melt, according to the European Environment Agency telegraph.co.uk/world-news/202…
❓Is it linked to climate change?
The German interior minister on Thursday blamed global warming for the floods.
Here's the latest on the global tech outage from reporter @matthfield:
Television channels, airports and banks around the world have been knocked offline in a massive outage causing Windows computers to suddenly shut down.
Sky News’s breakfast show was not on air on Friday morning, replaced by archive footage.
Downdetector, a website which monitors outages, reported sudden spikes in problems with websites including Microsoft applications, banking websites and airline apps.
On Ryanair’s website, the company urged passengers to arrive at airports three hours early blaming a “third party IT issue, which is outside Ryanair’s control and affect all airlines operating across the network”.
Our Senior Technology Reporter @GazTheJourno will be here from 1pm today to answer all of your questions!
Drop them below 👇
✍️ @GazTheJourno: Elon Musk has always wanted to create a company called X.
The first X was in fact an online bank he set up in the late 1990s - and its CEO was Peter Thiel. That company later became PayPal and was bought by eBay in 2002.
@GazTheJourno 🗣️ @GazTheJourno: Twitter’s blue bird logo has been with the site since its creation in 2006. Its branding has always been twee(t!), featuring the bird doing cutesy things including lifting up the fail whale on its ‘site over capacity’ page back in the 2010s… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
🇺🇦 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures, a Telegraph investigation has found.
🔴 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures.
Oleg Andreev, 65, who is paralysed, was taken by Russian invaders occupying his village in eastern Ukraine. Mr Andreev said his wheelchair was stolen by a Russian soldier, who used it for an
injured comrade.
🇺🇦 Exclusive: Alexander Lukashenko implicated in alleged war crime as boys and girls as young as six are taken to camps in 'forced deportation'
Read this exclusive in full from @sophia_yan, @Nat_Vasilyeva, and @VerityBowman here 👇
@sophia_yan @Nat_Vasilyeva @VerityBowman It is estimated that 2,150 Ukrainian children have been taken to at least four camps in Belarus since September 2022, with numbers expected to reach 3,000 by autumn this year.
Three of the “camps” are in the Minsk region, namely the Ostroshitsky Gorodok Sanatorium, the Zubrenok national children’s educational and health centre, and Dubrava children’s camp. The fourth site is the Golden Sands Sanatorium in the Gomel region.
🔴NEW: The US was concerned about what would happen to Russia’s nuclear weapons during the armed coup staged by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an official has said.