The wind will blow strongly across part of France this Wednesday. The Kirk depression will cause “intense rain” from Vendée to Champagne-Ardenne and strong winds in the Pyrenees, alert Météo-France, which has placed 30 departments on orange alert.
Among these departments, 23 are placed on orange vigilance for “rain-flood”, four for “wind” (Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Hautes-Pyrénées, Loire and Rhône) and three for floods (Haute-Saône, Saône-et-Loire and Vosges), details the bulletin published this Wednesday morning.
Torrential rains expected
The equivalent of a month of precipitation is expected in one day in an axis going from Vendée to Lorraine via the Paris region, specifies the organization. In Pays-de-la-Loire, the first region affected by the center of the depression, “60 to 80 mm” and up to “90 mm” of rain are locally expected during the day.
In Loire-Atlantique, the rains will increase in intensity during the day, reaching 10 to 15 mm in an hour, depending on the prefecture. Also, “an increase in the level of vigilance” is not excluded “in the south of Pays-de-la-Loire”, warns Météo-France. The rains will gradually ease but “40 to 60 mm” are still expected in the Paris Basin and in Champagne-Ardenne and “30 to 50 mm” near the Belgian border.
Stormy rain will also affect the Alpes-Maritimes in the evening. Currently on yellow alert, they could be placed on orange alert. Météo-France warns of the risk of flooding, due to “already very wet soil”.
Météo-France, on the other hand, only estimates at 17 the number of departments which will be on orange alert on Thursday, only for “rain-flooding”, and mainly in Ile-de-France and Lorraine.
An already particularly wet year
Storm Kirk continues the very wet trend of the year over most of mainland France. At the end of the rainiest month of September in twenty-five years, the average annual precipitation totals have already been exceeded almost everywhere in the country, in Nice, Saint-Nazaire, Strasbourg and even Le Mans and Paris.
Globally, September was marked by “extreme precipitation”, exacerbated by the planet’s abnormally hot temperatures for more than a year, a consequence of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions from the humanity, according to the European Copernicus Observatory.
Source: www.20minutes.fr
