Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Storm Hans.

I’m still here even though it’s been a while. About a year ago I commented on how last summer was the driest on record in South-Eastern Norway. To hydropower companies, such as the one I work for, the drought made it a serious challenge to keep our powerplants running. To the end consumers the consequence was economy-breaking energy prices and a real danger of energy rationing during the winter. In the end what saved us (for the time being..) was heavy rainfall in late September/early October and lots of snow in January.

Well, this year is the polar opposite. In (what used to be) a “normal” year, the reservoirs would rise rapidly and the water flow in the rivers would increase something like 5-fold around the 2nd half of May due to snowmelt in the mountains (often we would get a second peak in the autumn due to heavy rainfall). It was this “spring flood” that was completely absent last year. By comparison this year has been closer to “normal”. Until the last couple of weeks, that is. A little over two weeks ago now the weather forecasts predicted heavy rain, but no one was prepared for just how much. I was working when the downpour began and spent the next two days monitoring one of Norway’s largest lakes as it kept rising faster than anything anyone had ever seen. I must have received something like 6-7 phone calls in a single day telling me to open the floodgates even more than I already had (I barely had time to make one adjustment before they called back and asked for the next) because the situation was even worse than previously expected.

Still, this was nothing compared to what was about to hit us. We hadn’t even recovered from the last downpour when “Hans” arrived. As late as last Friday the models seemed to suggest that the impact in our area would be relatively mild. Then during the weekend the forecasts got a lot more dire and emergency level red was declared on Sunday evening. All our reservoirs have already surpassed the highest levels seen during the last spring flood (usually by far the highest levels during the course of a year), and continue rising so rapidly the graphs look almost vertical (despite all the floodgates being open wide). It takes a lot of water to raise the level in one of these lakes by one centimeter: 34-137 centimeters in 24 hours is insane! There are already reports of closed roads, flooded basements etc. And yet the peak isn’t expected to pass before Thursday or Friday this week. And the summer has always (in the past) been the driest season of the year!

Most of the people I talk to still seem to think of each new extreme weather event as a freak anomaly that will pass, and then everything will go back to “normal”. But it won’t. We left “normal” behind years ago, and the worst we have ever seen so far may soon be as good as it ever gets.