Everybody knows that Hurricane Harvey dumped massive amounts of rain onto southeast Texas, but Texas State Climatologist Dr. John Nielsen Gammon, who is a professor of climate science at Texas A&M, says the amount of rain dropped by Harvey broke all U.S. records for sustained rainfall, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
And Nielsen-Gammon says Harvey dropped 34.72 inches of rain over an area encompassing 10,000 square miles.
He says that breaks the previous record for the most rainfall over such a wide area, which was set by a storm in Texas back in 1899, which dropped 21.39 inches.
“Usually, if you break a record, it might by by five percent or ten percent,” he said. “Breaking it by nearly sixty percent is almost unheard of.”
Nielsen-Gammon studied all of the largest storms everywhere in the lower 48 U.S. states, as well as smaller storms east of the Continental Divide, all dating back to the beginning of record keeping in the late 19th Century.
“Its not unusual for a storm to break a record, and even to break several records, but Harvey broke them by a large amount.”
Despite all the talk about Houston’s unchecked growth, urban sprawl, and lack of zoning, Nielsen-Gammon says none of that really mattered with Harvey.
“Even the best urban preparations in the world would not have been designed for an event as extreme as Harvey,” he said.
Nielsen-Gammon’s rainfall calculations will be presented at a weather conference set for later this month in San Antonio.
The Houston Chronicle reported on Thursday that so much rain fell in Houston that the city actually sank by two centimeters under the weight of the water.