Thunderstorm? No, Mesoscale Convective system is what happened this week

A weather phenomenon known as a mesoscale convective system gave rise to yesterday’s adverse weather conditions over the Maltese islands.

This severe convection led to the intense rainfall over the Maltese islands. Malta Airport MetOffice analysed the data collected from its network of automatic weather stations and found that its Dingli station registered the highest rainfall intensity of 63mm/hour at 6am in the morning.

At the same time, B’Kara, Selmun and Luqa stations also registered high rainfall intensity of 46mm/hr, 43mm/hr and 37mm/hr respectively.

During the 24-hour period between the 24 and 25 October 2010, the total amount of rainfall measured at Luqa airport amounted to 102mm which exceeds that registered in similar but fatal events observed on 25 October 1979 when a total of 100.3mm of rain fell over Luqa airport.

So far, the total rainfall of 221.6mm registered at Luqa Airport for just this month ranks 5th since 1947. The highest amount of rainfall for the month of October was registered in 1951 with a total of 476.5 mm.

Constantly updated information direct from seven automatic weather stations scattered around Malta and Gozo together with information from the Airport weather station, a five day forecast, a detailed and constantly updated 3 day forecast for mariners, the UV Index, and Satellite Images are available online: www.maltairport.com/weather.