Extreme Rainfall in The City of Rio de Janeiro: History from the 19th Century

In this work a survey of extreme rainfall events and their effects on the population of the city of Rio de Janeiro is carried out over a period of approximately 63 years, from 1881 to 1996. The objective is, to recover the main events of extreme rainfall from the 19th century by the assessment of heavy rainfall reports, and to evaluate the usefulness of meteorological information in order to alert the population against disasters caused by heavy rains. Initially, cases with daily rainfall of 100 mm or greater were pre-selected. From the total of 100 pre-selected events, 82 cases were considered extreme events due to the great damages caused to the population, including deaths, injuries, material damages, landslides, floods, among others. This means the occurrence of 1.3 extreme event per year on average (82 cases in 63 years). As expected, most cases occurred in summer and fall (40% in each season) and the remaining 20% were equally distributed during spring (10%) and winter (10%).Throughout the analyzed period it was verified that the weather forecasts in the newspapers were not sufficient to alert the population in cases of heavy rains. In addition, reasonable explanations of the meteorological causes of phenomena were only informed from the 1990s. A n u á r i o d o I n s t i t u t o d e G e o c i ê n c i a s U F R J ISSN 0101-9759 e-ISSN 1982-3908 Vol. 40 2 / 2017 p. 17-30 18 A n u á r i o d o I n s t i t u t o d e G e o c i ê n c i a s U F R J ISSN 0101-9759 e-ISSN 1982-3908 Vol. 40 2 / 2017 p. 17-30 Chuvas Extremas no Município do Rio de Janeiro: Histórico a partir do Século XIX Claudine Pereira Dereczynski, Renata Novaes Calado & Airton Bodstein de Barros