This week’s flash floods felt familiar for many South Floridians, given the torrential downpours that shattered multiple weather records last year.
In April 2023, there was the storm system that dumped close to a historic 26 inches of rain in 12 hours in the Fort Lauderdale region. Another example came in November 2023 when over several days, 12 inches of rain fell on much of Broward and Miami-Dade counties. Now, earlier this week, nearly 20 inches of rain fell across parts of southern Broward, with some areas again seeing record-breaking rainfall.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel asked some weather experts to weigh in on why such flash floods and days of heavy rainfall have kept surfacing — to the frustration of residents who’ve dealt with flooded homes and more.
These are some answers from Craig Setzer, chief meteorologist for the Royal Caribbean Group, and Will Redman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Miami. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Are these types of rain events now what we can expect each year?
REDMAN: “It’s not guaranteed that that’s going to happen. There is potential for it just because it happened last year and this year, but it should not be a regular occurring thing.
“That’s basically how I view that, but overall, the climate is just too unpredictable.
“We are noticing events like this across the country, more abnormal events happening more than normal. But that said, it’s still way too uncertain and not guaranteed to happen every year or at least on a regular occurring basis.”
Can you discuss what we’ve been facing this week, as well as in recent years, and if this will become a pattern?
SETZER: “From a rainfall point of view, it’s hard to say if this is a trend. … Rainfall is a little more nuanced (than hurricanes) because in some ways, one man’s flood can be another person’s famine.
“The precise distribution of rainfall is a little bit trickier to say, you know, this area is going to have more rain in the coming years as opposed to an area 30 miles away.
“If you think back in the last couple of decades, Fort Lauderdale seemed to always be the dry spot. Fort Lauderdale seemed to always end up with a deficit of rainfall on an annual basis. And what kind of seems like to kick things off was last April’s flood event. And then now we’ve had this other heavy rain that was kind of centered on Broward, northern Miami-Dade.”
Are this week’s many days of rain a sign of what we can expect the rest of this rainy season (as well as this year’s hurricane season)?
SETZER: “It seems like if we don’t get the rainy season going in May, which we didn’t this year, then when it comes in June, it comes in pretty furiously.
“That could be because the overall steering patterns that support the rainy season are a little more energetic when the rainy season is delayed because we still have cold fronts coming through in May, they kept dry air coming in.
“So this year, now the rainy season is underway, the atmosphere is already loaded to go. And so then, once we started squeezing precipitation out, it was fairly excessive. So it’s hard to say that this is a predictive value.
“One of the things we know that as the Earth gets a little bit warmer, as the globe warms, the atmosphere can support higher moisture content.
“So it’s possible to squeeze more rain out of it in certain locations.”
REDMAN: “We are expecting a more active season in general just because of the La Niña taking formation again.
“So because of that, it is still likely to remain active, but I wouldn’t say like this, it probably just would be more of your daily rounds of showers and thunderstorms, you know, each afternoon and evening.
“But overall it shouldn’t be anything like this routinely.”
This was an unnamed rain event. What would be the challenge to have a flooded region, only to then have an actual hurricane pass through?
SETZER: “If we continue to see rain and we continue to keep our canals full and the ground saturated, then we’re much more likely to flood or be flood prone during a hurricane.
“A hurricane is often such an overwhelming event that you can almost have like desert-like conditions and a hurricane hits and dumps 30 inches of rain and you have a flood, it’s not good that we’re already kind of above the seasonal normal for rainfall.”
“Now, if it stops raining here and doesn’t rain through July, we’ll be back to ground zero, so to speak.
“But if it stays wet through the summer and then we have a hurricane, even the outer bands of the hurricane are going to be more impactful in terms of rainfall.”
When can South Florida expect a reprieve from this week’s stormy weather?
REDMAN: “There still could be more showers and storms popping up over the weekend, but it shouldn’t be this widespread. And that’s what we’re kind of looking at Saturday or Sunday at the beginning of that.”
SETZER: “This pattern is kind of unusual in that we’ve had the ability for the atmosphere to reload and hit us for days and days.
“A lot of times in South Florida, you have a big rain event, but a rain event usually will only last two or three days, or maybe like 24 to 30 hours at the most. It’s unusual to have successive heavy rainfall events.”
“I think as we get into the weekend, finally, there’s some prior air that’s coming in this trough in the atmosphere that’s supporting the rainfall finally beginning to move out, and we’re going to get a break.
“But now we’ve turned our metropolitan area into a swamp almost with so much water.”
“We’re going to be in a probably pretty good rainy season pattern here now until the pattern changes again. So I would say at least through the rest of this month, it doesn’t mean flooding every day, but it means some heavy downpours.”