Northeast saw two instances of roughly 1-in-1,000 year rainfall in one night
In two locations on the same night, the storm that hit the Northeast this weekend dumped rain at or near rates that should only be expected once in 1,000 years.
In two places on the same night, the storm that deluged the Northeast this weekend dumped rain at or near rates that should be expected only once in a thousand years.
The storm killed at least three people and caused widespread flooding. It dropped about 10 inches of rain over 12 hours on Sunday in parts of Connecticut including Oxford and Southbury. About 35 miles away, about 6.7 inches of rain fell in three hours on Sunday night in Stony Brook, New York. Both are measures that would have roughly a 0.1% chance of happening in a year, according to federal rainfall probability data.
“There were two areas that got sort of equally extreme rainfall, and they didn’t happen at the same time,” said Nick Bassill, director of the state weather risk communication center at the University at Albany in New York. “Any one of those would be noteworthy, and it’s interesting not only that we got two of them in the larger storm pattern, but that they were consecutive.”
It’s impossible to immediately determine the influence of climate change on a particular event, but scientists said the one-two punch of extreme rainfall fits the pattern in the Northeast, where more severe storms are growing increasingly likely.
“These thunderstorms now are packing more rainfall,” said Mark Wysocki, who recently retired as New York state’s climatologist.
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