It is seven o'clock in the evening on July 2nd, 2011. A cloudburst of historic proportions has just struck north of Copenhagen.
It is seven o'clock in the evening on July 2nd, 2011. A cloudburst of historic proportions has just struck north of Copenhagen. On the roof of his car, a taxi driver tries to save himself from the floodwaters as rain and hail plunge into the water and cars floating around him on Lyngbyvej.
On this day, the Danish capital experienced an extreme cloudburst that cost society billions of kroner. At Rigshospitalet, the situation was so dire that the floodwater was centimetres away from destroying the hospital's generators and triggering an evacuation of 1400 patients.
Now, Niels Bohr Institute and DMI researchers have used an unconventional tool to understand 2011’s extreme downpour. Counterfactual history is when you change something about an historical event to analyze the What if? Typically used by historians to understand our past, climate scientists have begun deploying the method in a similar way.
Read More at: University of Copenhagen
