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.
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.
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.
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
