Why the Unrelenting Downpour in Florida Won’t Stop

Wednesday, a storm hit Fort Lauderdale and it was almost like Florida Man – it felt never-ending. Normally, storms end up weakening once they are out of rain or cold air is sucked in, but this one had something special – the warm and humid air from the nearby Gulf Stream.

Fort Lauderdale in the USA experienced a lot of rain over 6-8 hours. A weather historian named Chris Burt found out that it has one of the three highest amounts of rain that fell in any US city over 24 hours: 25 inches (63.5 centimeters). That’s less than Hilo, Hawaii’s 27 inches (68.58 centimeters) in 2000 and Port Arthur, Texas’s 26.5 inches (67.31 centimeters) which happened in 2017.

Greg Carbin, who works at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center, said that Florida has good conditions for hurricanes to form because it has a certain type of landscape, warm water not too distant, plus other factors.

Two days earlier, a weather expert named David Roth had noticed that the conditions were similar to those in April 25th of 1979 when it rained really heavily. That downpour caused 16 inches of rain to fall in Fort Lauderdale.

On Wednesday, we experienced a supercell thunderstorm over Fort Lauderdale. Supercells are intense storms that can create dangerous tornadoes and hail – they usually travel quickly and ravage areas of the Great Plains and the Mid-South. So be careful out there!

A normal cell like what happened in Fort Lauderdale should have stopped after about 20 minutes, but it was stuck between two different sets of weather and lasted for a total of 6 to 8 hours.

Steve Bowen, a meteorologist and scientist for GallagherRe, said that when it is really warm and wet outside, all the heat and moisture starts to act like a vacuum. This ‘vacuum’ then sucks up all the water and air into one big core system – making the weather keep getting worse!

Ryan Maue, a past person in charge of NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), stated that the Gulf Stream provided an unlimited source of really hot air.

There were some interesting weather factors in the Gulf of Mexico that created a powerful low pressure system. The cool area on land in Florida and the hot waters of the Gulf Stream had different temperatures, and wind shear also happened which meant that at high and low levels there were winds travelling in opposite directions. This added more strength to the system.

The Gulf Stream is a place that normally has some rain. But this time, lots of rain came down because the different conditions combined in just the right way. The National Weather Service said there’s only a one-in-a-thousand chance that so much rain would come at once! Scientists are seeing more and more weather like this happen these days, and it means that what we think is “normal” weather is changing.

Physics has found that when the climate is warmer, it can hold more water vapor (moisture) in the air. For every one degree of Fahrenheit temperature rise, the amount of water vapor increases by 4%. This means that if the climate gets hotter, storms will be much stronger and they will bring more rain with them.

In recent years, it has been observed that heavy rainfalls are happening more and more often – and will continue to do so in the coming decades. This is a warning sign for people living in South Florida because these strong rains combined with rising sea levels put them in danger due to climate change.

This story was updated with the right information that Michael Mann is affiliated to University of Pennsylvania, not Pennsylvania State University. For more news about climate and environment, visit https://bigbignews.net/climate-and-environment and check out Seth Borenstein’s Twitter profile @borenbears. Several private foundations support the Associated Press’s coverage on climate and environment topics. You can find out more about AP’s climate initiative in their website. All content featured is solely created by the Associated Press.