Venice: flood or drought?
Reuters recently reported that “Venice canals start to run dry as low tide and lack of rain hit” in a news article on February 21, 2023. This sounds so contradictory to what we normally think about global warming. Should Venice worry more about flooding instead of drought? Isn’t global warming making sea levels higher than usual?
Photograph: Manuel Silvestri/Reuters. Source: theguardian.com
I found sea level data at Venice station from sea level monitoring website. This website reported real-time sea level from 1075 monitoring stations. You can also select any previous time periods to see the historical data. For Venice station, the data is recorded for every minute. I retrieved all the data in February from year 2013 to year 2023.
what does the data say?
Sea level at Venice station is obviously lower in Feb 2023 compared with past 10 years.
Red line represents 2023. Other lines are the past 10 years.
Red line represents 2023. Grey line represents the average of past 10 years (2013-2022).
The data indeed shows that in Feb 2023, Venice has a much lower tide than usual. So is the sea level actually decreasing? Isn’t that seem to be contradictory to global warming? And how about the flood everyone talked about in 2019 (see: Venice has its worst flood in 53 years)? I have no conclusion but data but we should look at more data to understand this phenomenon.