I don’t know about you, but these once in one-to-five-thousand-year weather events are becoming tiresome.
In Fort Lauderdale, FL, 22-25 inches of heavy rainfall poured over the city, most of which fell in less than seven hours. Flash flooding closed the airport and railways, leaving cars stranded on city streets.
Florida is highly vulnerable to global heating. The words climate change are still banned in Florida after Rick Scott implemented the policy for government workers. DeSantis has not made a statement I can find; he must be too busy making the lives of women, brown, and gay people as miserable as possible.
Keep in mind that April falls within the dry season in Florida. The rainy season begins in mid-to-late May.
Fort Lauderdale was my hometown for over twenty years. It is a sapphire-blue city. I left after a similar rainfall flooded my home in 2021. Heavier and long-lasting rainfall is a clear indicator of climate change.
From the EPA (2021):
- In recent years, a larger percentage of precipitation has come in the form of intense single-day events. Nine of the top 10 years for extreme one-day precipitation events have occurred since 1996 (see Figure 1).
- The prevalence of extreme single-day precipitation events remained fairly steady between 1910 and the 1980s, but has risen substantially since then. Over the entire period from 1910 to 2020, the portion of the country experiencing extreme single-day precipitation events increased at a rate of about half a percentage point per decade (see Figure 1).
- The percentage of land area experiencing much greater than normal yearly precipitation totals increased between 1895 and 2020. There has been much year-to-year variability, however. In some years there were no abnormally wet areas, while a few others had abnormally high precipitation totals over 10 percent or more of the contiguous 48 states’ land area (see Figure 2). For example, 1941 was extremely wet in the West, while 1982 was very wet nationwide.3
- Figures 1 and 2 are both consistent with other studies that have found an increase in heavy precipitation over timeframes ranging from single days to seasons to years.4 For more information on trends in overall precipitation levels, see the U.S. and Global Precipitation indicator.