Inland Rainfall

September 12, 2007

The coastline gets the attention when a hurricane’s headed for land, but University of Florida researchers are learning how to better predict where hurricanes will dump the most rain days and hundreds of miles after they come on shore. That’s where most deaths from big storms occur.

Matyas: “People are better informed now along the coast; they’ll evacuate. But once a storm moves inland, people kind of forget about it; it may not be front page of the newspaper anymore.”

UF climatologist Corene Matyas says the shape of storms could hold the key. Existing rainfall projection models often can’t account for lopsided rain bands where rain falls mostly on one side of a storm. So researchers studied the shape of thirteen storms from 1997 to 2003.

Matyas: “Ok, we think this much rain is going to fall in this region of the storm. We have a model that shows that area moving inland and then we can get an idea of the underlying topography, soil conditions, and population. Is it an area that’s likely to flood under much less precipitation?”

Results suggest emergency managers might one day use those shape measures to predict rainfall and warn inland residents.

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