Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 12, 715–730, 2012 www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci.net/12/715/2012/ Natural Hazards doi:10.5194/nhess-12-715-2012 and Earth © Author(s) 2012. CC Attribution 3.0 License. System Sciences The 20 February 2010 Madeira flash-floods: synoptic analysis and extreme rainfall assessment M. Fragoso1, R. M. Trigo2, J. G. Pinto3, S. Lopes1,4, A. Lopes1, S. Ulbrich3, and C. Magro4 1IGOT, University of Lisbon, Portugal 2IDL, Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal 3Institute for Geophysics and Meteorology, University of Cologne, Germany 4Laboratorio´ Regional de Engenharia Civil, R.A. Madeira, Portugal Correspondence to: M. Fragoso (
[email protected]) Received: 9 May 2011 – Revised: 26 September 2011 – Accepted: 31 January 2012 – Published: 23 March 2012 Abstract. This study aims to characterise the rainfall ex- island of Madeira is quite densely populated, particularly in ceptionality and the meteorological context of the 20 Febru- its southern coast, with circa 267 000 inhabitants in 2011 ary 2010 flash-floods in Madeira (Portugal). Daily and census, with 150 000 (approximately 40 %) living in the Fun- hourly precipitation records from the available rain-gauge chal district, one of the earliest tourism hot spots in Europe, station networks are evaluated in order to reconstitute the currently with approximately 30 000 hotel beds. In 2009, the temporal evolution of the rainstorm, as its geographic inci- archipelago received 1 million guests; this corresponds to an dence, contributing to understand the flash-flood dynamics income of more than 255 Million Euro (INE-Instituto Na- and the type and spatial distribution of the associated im- cional de Estat´ıstica, http://www.ine.pt).