After last week’s deadly storm that dumped up to 20 inches of rain in some places, communities along the coast of North and South Carolina are still drying out.
A few climatologists have called the storm a “thousand-year event.” This is the kind of system that we may have to get used to in the years to come, they say.
In fact, there have been nine storms along the coast of North and South Carolina in the last 25 years that would be considered once every hundred or thousand years.
“Just because we say something is a 500-year, 1,000-year, or 10-year flood event doesn’t mean it can’t happen in two months.” “It doesn’t mean it can’t happen next year,” said Steve Pfaff, who is in charge of weather at the NWS office in Wilmington.
Pfaff says that Potential Tropical Cyclone 8, the storm that caused so much damage last week but didn’t have a name, had all the signs of a very strong, wet system.
“I think it just goes to really teach us again that it doesn’t have to have a name to have impacts associated with it,” said Pfaff.
“Thousand-year event” refers to the chance that a storm or flood will happen in a certain year. For thousand-year storms, that chance is.1%. But Pfaff says they’ve happened a lot more often since Hurricane Floyd in 1999.
“The problem that we’re seeing is a lot of these multi-hundred-year thousand-year events that have occurred just in our office’s area of responsibility has increased markedly since Hurricane Floyd in 1999,” he added.
Many people living along the coast were caught off guard by the storm, but Kathie Dello from the State Climate Office of North Carolina says it wasn’t the estimate that was wrong, it was how it was shared.
“It rained more than 15 inches on some of the models.” “But we’re telling you about things that haven’t happened before,” Dello said.
Dello thinks that warmer air and water in the atmosphere are making these storms stronger and pushing the edges of what North Carolina weather can do.
We’ve been having weather whiplash here in North Carolina, where the weather is going back and forth between extremes. The dry is really dry and the wet is really wet. She said, “It’s hard to get ready for both.”