The few fans in attendance in the downpour Friday night for the football game between the Eagles from Centennnial High School and the Marriotts Ridge Mustangs flooded the field after the Eagles won their first home game in eight years, writes Gabby Graves in The Wingspan student newspaper at Centennial High School in Ellicott City, Maryland.
(school via Twitter)Senior wide receiver Matthieu Jacob took one of his two touchdown passes in the game 78 yards to the end zone.
“It was [a] much needed [win] for the program, and it really lifted the team morale,” he was quoted as saying about the game.
The school made the decision to disband football three years ago, a small part of the reason the team hasn’t won a home game for so many years. But the losing streak went back a few years before that and continued in the fall season of 2019.
The elation and celebration are thus understandable, despite severe weather just a few miles away. The city of Annapolis in neighboring Anne Arundel County experienced flooding in the streets that was bad enough to cause a few thousand power outages and kayakers in the street, WBAL-TV (NBC affiliate) reported.
Severe weather events, with heavier-than-normal precipitation, are expected to continue with steady global warming, the BBC reports. Although our ability to forecast severe weather has improved over the years, translating those sophisticated forecasts into local warnings isn’t easy.
Take the case of the severe flooding in Europe, especially Germany, in July. The floods in western Germany and eastern Belgium left more than 200 people dead and destroyed structures that had been standing for centuries.
“What is a good forecast today in terms of the meteorological variables still leaves a very high uncertainty about what’s going to be happening locally on the ground,” the BBC quoted head of research Professor Sarah Jones of the German National Meteorological Service as saying. “It’s clear that we need to improve our systems. We need to be able to make more accurate forecasts.”
