By Frank Lloyd Tiongson, Reporter

Fingers are pointed at climate change as Metro Manila struggles to recover from the aftermath of tropical storm Ondoy, which brought epic rainfall on Saturday submerging around 80 percent of the metropolis in floodwater.

Meteoroligists of the Philippine Atmosperic, Geophysical and Astronomical Services (Pagasa) said the rainfall recorded in Manila was the capital’s “greatest” amount of rain since June 7, 1967.

Nilo Prisco, head of the weather bureau, said Ondoy dumped 410.6mm of rain in Manila in a span of nine hours. The amount exceeded the average monthly rainfall of 391mm and the 1967 record of 331mm, which was tallied in a 24-hour period.

Saturday’s deluge also exceeded the 380mm rainfall brought by Hurricane Katrina, which ravaged Louisiana and other southern states of the US with floods and storm surges in 2005.
“We can attribute this to climate change,” Prisco said.

Officials from the weather bureau stressed that while they forecasted that Ondoy would hit landfall in Luzon, they did not expect that it would bring off-the-charts rainfall, which poured nonstop on Saturday.

Extreme weather event

In other reports, Nathaniel Cruz also of the weather bureau concluded that the record-breaking rainfall was an “extreme weather event” that may be attributed to climate change.

He also noted that because of climate change, the country should expect more extreme weather events, such as extreme rainfall.

Apparently, the onslaught of the tropical storm Ondoy, which was the 15th tropical cyclone to hit the Philippines, provided a glimpse of what scientists have projected to be one of the glaring effects of climate change.

In a study published in the August 2009 journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Caltech concluded that climate change would lead to an increase in heavy rainfall events across most of the world.

The study explained that warmer air could retain more water vapor than cooler air. As such, as the climate heats up, “there will be more vapor in the atmosphere, which will lead to an increase in precipitation extremes,” says study co-author Paul O’Gorman of MIT.

Using computer models, the study predicted that precipitation in extreme events would increase by about 6 percent for every 1.8-degree rise in global temperature.

Headed toward Vietnam

Ondoy, meanwhile, was expected to hit landfall in Vietnam over the next 24 hours traveling West Northwest at 24 kilometers per hour as it gains strength while hovering over the South China Sea with maximum sustained winds of 105 kilometers per hour near the center and gustiness of up to 135 kilometers per hour.

As of press time, the weather bureau expected the tropical storm to be located 770 kilometers West Northwest of Iba, Zambales, this morning, concurrently lifting storm signal warnings from all parts of the Philippines.