A heavy downpour hit Warsaw on the night from Monday to Tuesday. The difficulties are considerable, many places in the city were flooded. Tomasz Wasilewski from tvnmeteo.pl talked on TVN24 about what made the weather in the capital so violent.
– We were dealing with an exceptional situation – said Tomasz Wasilewski, presenter and forecaster of tvnmeteo.pl, on TVN24. He added that what happened that night in Warsawhas at least three causes.
Three causes of downpour
– We had a front where two air masses met – hot and cold. This is usually what happens at the front, and it was the same this time, storm clouds were growing. The second reason was that this front had been wavy for many, many days, or as meteorologists say, it did not show a decisive movement either in one direction or the other. It was slowly, very lazily winding. From the clouds that were in one place on this front, just like in Warsaw at night, rain fell for several hours – said Wasilewski.
As Wasilewski admitted, if the front had moved quickly, it would also have been heavy and intense, but it would have quickly left the area and moved on. – These clouds hung almost stationary over Warsaw for five hours – he added.
Heated city
The third reason is that for several days Warsaw and the Warsaw agglomeration have been a huge urban heat island.
– We had a heatwave of over 30 degrees Celsius for several days. In such a situation, when storm clouds with heavy rainfall were so lazy and almost did not move over Warsaw, they received an additional huge impulse from this heated city, concrete surfaces, in the form of strong upward currents – said Wasilewski.
Tomasz Wasilewski on what happened in WarsawTVN24
Main image source: PAP/Leszek Szymanski