Météo France has placed Doubs, Jura, Haute-Saône and Territoire de Belfort on orange storm alert from 4pm this Saturday until midnight. Forecasters are warning of the risk of large hailstones and violent gusts.
As a sign of the potential violence of the storms forecast for this Saturday evening, June 29, the “Rencontres et racines” festival in Audincourt, in Doubs, announced this morning that it was canceling the day. “We are not taking any risks with the safety of festival-goers” said Mathieu Sabarly, director of the festival, “with 15 000 people on site, with winds and hail forecast, there is no choice”. “We will accommodate our campers” he added.
The weather in Franche-Comté is indeed set to be explosive. Météo France has placed the entire region on orange storm alert, from 4 p.m. until late at night.
The weather forecasting agency estimates that a “generalized stormy degradation” will reach the region from 6 p.m., with “intense electrical activity”who can “causing violent gusts of wind, hail and heavy rainfall”.
Météo France specifies that “these storms are particularly virulent” and could cause gusts of up to 120km/hour, as well as rain of up to “40mm in less than an hour and very locally up to 80mm over the entire episode”.
Keraunos, “office specializing in the forecasting and management of risks linked to violent phenomena”believes that these storms, whose exact location and timing cannot be predicted, could be even more violent. The organization uses a red color code, “severe thunderstorms” to qualify the risk (but not purple, “extreme storms”) : “lThe storms are expected to organize into a convective system capable of producing violent gusts of wind exceeding 100 km/h, reaching locally 130/140 km/h. Very significant rainfall accumulations (> 50 mm) in a short period of time are expected” forecasts the day’s bulletin for the northeast quarter.
“Hailstorms could be very heavy, exceeding 5cm” the report specifies, adding “but the risk of giant hailstones (10cm) appears very limited.”
The Météo Franc-Comtoise forecast site is coming forward with more precise forecasts: “Electrical activity starts at 4 or 5 p.m.”. Estimating that the storms will begin “between the Jura and the Loue valley, capable of producing heavy hail, the diameter of which is likely to reach 3/4 or even 6cm”.
The site warns of the saying “significant localized ‘flash’ floods”and of “lightning in quantity”.
The rest of the region could be affected after 6 p.m. in Doubs and 7 p.m. in Haute-Saône and in the Territoire de Belfort. A second wave of disturbances could affect the region in the second part of the evening.
“All this remains to be confirmed in real time, because so-called “explosive” degradations (like this one) always hold surprises, sometimes with large space-time shifts,” adds the forecast site. These real-time forecasts can be found on the site’s Facebook page.
