Storm Alex affected the United Kingdom on 03 and 04 October 2020 and that Saturday 03 October 2020 was the UK’s wettest day on record since records began in 1891.
According to the Met Office blog:
“The rainfall was very widespread resulting in average rainfall across the entire UK of 31.7mm, or to put it another way, if expressed as the volume of rain that is more than the capacity of Loch Ness – the largest lake in the UK by volume at 7.4 cubic kilometres of water”
Storm Alex first affected the western Mediterranean part of Europe on 30 September 2020 and was the first windstorm named in the 2020–21 European windstorm season. As such, it was named Alex by AEMET and Météo-France, rather than the UK’s Met Office and the Republic of Ireland’s Met Éireann and their joint names list.
Visualising Storm Alex Precipitation
After the windstorm, on 03 November 2020, the Met Office released a PDF entitled “Storm Alex and heavy rain 2 to 4 October 2020” with commentary, data and maps about the storms precipitation.
Using freely available Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Level 3 IMERG Final Run data at ~10km x 10km resolution and the R software environment for statistical computing and graphics, the animation below was created of the half-hourly precipitation that occurred during Storm Alex across Scotland between 00:00 03 October 2020 and 23:00 04 October 2020.
See also Scotland’s Rainfall in 2020, Did You Know? – Scotland’s Climate and A digital archive of extreme rainfalls in the British Isles from 1866 to 1968 based on British Rainfall.
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