Southern Alberta Flooding

In the past couple of weeks there have been two big rain storms in Canada which have caused a great deal of flooding. The first was the Southern Alberta floods and the second was the flood in Toronto. I was curious about how the amount of rain we have had stacks up against some other storms. I was always struck by the floods in India during the monsoon season so I looked up some number on that and also on the world record for most rain in 24 hours.

Of course I wanted to create a visualization of it because that’s what I do. Click on the picture to get through to the full visualization

Click for details

Now I know that the amount of rain is just one part of the flood story but the numbers are still interesting. Can you imagine being around to see 1.8m of rain fall in 24 hours? I guess it was the result of a major hurricane. Incidentally Foc-Foc is on an islandRéunion near Madagascar. I’d never heard of it, despite 800 000 people living there.

I used these as the data sources:

Toronto 126mm -http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2013/07/09/toronto-rain-flooding-power-ttc.html

Calgary45mm ““ http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2013/06/21/f-alberta-floods.html

Mumbai 181.1mm -http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/1845996/report-mumbai-gets-its-third-highest-rainfall-for-june-in-a-decade-at-181-1-mm

Foc-Foc, Réunion1,825mm -http://wmo.asu.edu/world-greatest-twenty-four-hour-1-day-rainfall