Hurricane Milton dumped so much rain over parts of Florida’s Tampa Bay area that it qualified as a 1-in-1,000-year rainfall event.
St. Petersburg had 18.31 inches of rain — or more than 1.5 feet — in the 24-hour period during which the storm made landfall, according to precipitation data from the National Weather Service.
That included a staggering 5.09 inches in one hour, from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. ET — a level considered to have roughly a 0.1% chance of happening in any given year.
was a 1-in-1,000-year rain event
“Was,” as in used to be a 1 in 1000 year event. Now its anybody’s guess.
I see we’ve graduated from once-in-a-lifetime events to 1 in every 1000 years events. Congrats everyone!
The next storm of this magnitude should be in two years.
That’s overly optimistic.
And it could have easily been so much worse.
There’s still plenty of time for that. Hurricane season doesn’t end til Nov 30.
*used to be
1 in 1000 year events are poorly named. One because it describes a likelihood, so this storm had a 0.1% chance of occurring in any given year, so we’d expect to see a storm like this once every thousand years on average. It’s not cyclical. Two, the likelihood of these storms is steadily increasing and so it’s probably no longer a 1 in 1000 year event.
