Serious flooding has hit parts of Saudi Arabia after a red rainfall warning was issued at the end of last week by the National Centre for Meteorology. The areas most seriously affected were in the north, specifically the provinces of Hail and al-Qassim and the far north of Ash Sharqiyah.
High rainfall totals, hailstorms and lightning were expected to come with heavy showers that moved in from the west. Typically, these parts of Saudi Arabia receive about 10-15mm of rainfall in December, with this falling across three to six days of the month. However, some meteorological models were suggesting rainfall totals of 20-50mm in places by the time the warning ended during the early hours of Saturday night.
So far there have been reports of flooding and large quantities of hail covering the streets in the city of Buraydah, al-Qassim. While exact measurements have been difficult to obtain, there has been video footage of cars either driving through flood waters or becoming stranded in large quantities of hail once the flood water receded.
Temperatures across large swathes of Canada will continue to remain at least 5C above the average through this week. In some areas there will be an extreme difference in temperature from the seasonal norm, notably for parts of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario, where daytime maximums could be 20C higher than the average. For context, Thompson in north-central Manitoba has a daily mean temperature of -20.6C in December, but is expected to reach -2C early this week.
Records have already been broken across southern British Columbia as weather stations recorded highs of 12.9C on 27 December, surpassing the previous record set in 1922.
Temperatures in west Vancouver then smashed the previous temperature record by 2.5C on 29 December as temperatures reached 14C. By 31 December, at least 22 records were tied or broken, according to Environment Canada.
Wrapping up 2023, the Dutch meteorological service (KNMI) recently announced that the Netherlands had both the warmest and – preliminarily – the wettest year since measurements began in 1901.
The national average air temperature was 11.8C, while there was an average amount of precipitation of 1,060mm, almost 300mm more than normal. Surprisingly, despite the year being so wet, the year was also very sunny too with an extra 136 hours of sunshine.
