Thunderstorm in Tokyo area disrupts train operations

[bill937ca]

Up to 100mm per hour of rain are expected for areas in Tokyo.

 

A heavy thunderstorm that struck Tokyo and northern Kanagawa Prefecture on Tuesday afternoon caused a power outage that left two trains stranded between stations on Tokyu Corp.’s Toyoko Line in Kawasaki, forcing passengers to walk on the track during evacuation.

 

 JR Tokai  suspended shinkansen services between Shinagawa in Tokyo and Shin-Yokohama in Kanagawa at around 4:30 p.m.  for 40 minutes as rainfall exceeded the threshold of 60 mm per hour in Kawasaki. 

 

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/07/23/national/thunderstorm-in-tokyo-area-disrupts-mass-transit/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+japantimes+%28The+Japan+Times%3A+All+Stories%29#.Ue8jOI2Tipc

[bikkuri bahn]

Sudden and concentrated cloudbursts.  This is a scene in Setagaya, Tokyo.  Hope gmat was not caught in this.

[bill937ca]

This is not isolated.  Toronto downtown received 97mm recently and 126mm at the airport.

Edited July 24, 2013 by bill937ca

[tantousha]

Good thing climate change is just a hoax right guys...

[E6系]

Off topic, but I think it odd that although we had an ice age 10,000 years ago global warming only started about 100 years ago.

 

Doesn't make sense, right?

[tantousha]

Off topic, but I think it odd that although we had an ice age 10,000 years ago global warming only started about 100 years ago.

 

Doesn't make sense, right?

 

Kind of. The earth does have a natural cooling and warming cycle, but when scientists talk about global warming and climate change they're actually referring to change that is attributed to human activities...

[gmat]

I was at Shinjuku Station during the worst of the downpour. I was chasing the MUE-Train that I saw heading south at Ikebukuro on the Saikyo Lline. I waited at the very southern end of platform 5/6 and caught it as it came back. Still some rain at that point. The rain turned into a drizzle shortly afterwards. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Best wishes,

Grant

Edited July 24, 2013 by gmat

[Ronny]

off topic, what is MUE-Train?

[gmat]

Here you are.

 

http://www.jreast.co.jp/e/development/theme/trust/muetrain.html

 

Best wishes,

Grant

[Ronny]

thanks gmat

[KenS]

At first, I was a bit surprised that their threshold was only 60mm/hr; I've certainly heard of much more extreme rainfalls. But apparently while Tokyo gets a lot of rain, falls of 60mm/hr are fairly rare (one report said that Tokyo peak rainfall averages 50mm/4hr over the July-September stretch).

 

Tokyo has a radar-based rain-monitoring system, called Tokyo Amesh, that can measure rainfall on a minute-by-minute basis for a 250 meter grid covering the entire metropolitan area. From a highway report based on that, rainfall over 10mm/hr only occurs during typhoons, and rainfall over 20mm/hr is apparently rare enough that the report didn't further subdivide that category. Although a bit of googleing also turned up a number of ~60mm/hr storms in the last decade. One report (PDF) suggests that rainfall of 61mm/hr happens once every 17 years on average (so railfaill >60mm/hr would be more frequent, but not a lot more).

[ToniBabelony]

Off topic, but I think it odd that although we had an ice age 10,000 years ago global warming only started about 100 years ago.

 

Technically, we're still in an ice age, since there is still a significant amount of ice on both poles. The world is only slowly getting out of the ice age, with a little help from us of course.

 

Anyway, today is going to be another very rainy day. Prefectures like Fukui experienced some serious washouts yesterday, so expect some disruptions of train operations in the Kanto area as well today.

 

UPDATE:

 

Yamaguchi line washed out. One dead, one missing, 150 people isolated:

http://news.tv-asahi.co.jp/news_society/articles/000009598.html

Edited July 28, 2013 by Toni Babelony

[Nick_Burman]

Luckily this is Japan. Were it in the UK, they would be blaming any delays on the "wrong type of rain" ...

 

Cheers NB

[ToniBabelony]

Luckily this is Japan. Were it in the UK, they would be blaming any delays on the "wrong type of rain" ...

 

Here it's more like: しょうがない (Can't be helped). So improve technology and pray more to the weather gods (a good balance of belief and technology IMO).