Extreme Weather

Hello everyone! This week we’re covering extreme weather and how it affects the Netherlands. According to The Hague, weather in the Netherlands is hardly ever extreme, but can be unpredictable. The Netherlands gets about 700 millimeters of rainfall a year, and only occasionally sees heavy storms with high winds and hard rain. According to a study on extreme weather in the Netherlands by Menno van Wjik, heavy rainfall in the summer of 2021 primarily affected the provinces of Limburg and Noord-Brabant; although, the heavy rainfall had more severely impacted Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. Due to rainfall from the more heavily impacted countries, the rivers Geul and Gulp flooded, which led to notable damage in over 5 counties in the Netherlands. On top of that, the Maas (Meuse) River’s water level reached a record high but did not flood due to active water management. Wjik’s study say that if the Maas River had flooded, damages would have increased exponentially. Fortunately, there were no fatalities caused by the heavy rainfall and flooding, but total material damages had cost the Netherlands an estimated 1.8 billion EUR (nearly 2 million in USD). 



According to Wjik, the likelihood and scale of future extreme weather events in the Netherlands depends largely on water management. This entails the use of water locks to mitigate rising water levels and the maintenance of dikes to prevent flooding. Should the proper measure not be taken, the Netherlands could face even greater economic costs due to extreme weather. In order to bring awareness to the effects of climate change throughout the Netherlands in current and future scenarios, the Netherland’s Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management has sponsored a digital Climate Impact Atlas that is available to the public. Additionally, the KNMI (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute), which is the Dutch national weather forecasting service, monitors and forecasts climate changes to the public. Both the KNMI’s website and app are set to alert the public should any extreme weather approach the Netherlands.


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