The amount of rain that could fall on southeast Texas may come to equal four times the volume of the Great Salt Lake.
CREDIT: Getty Images
As of Monday night, Hurricane Harvey has brought at least 25 inches of rain to parts of Texas, including Houston, the nation’s fourth most populous city. By now you’ve likely seen images of the desperate evacuations.
But remarkably, we may only be about halfway through the downpour, and that’s if we’re lucky.
Forecasts say the city could see another 25 inches of rain as the storm continues to sit over the region, sucking up Gulf moisture and dumping it on (quickly disappearing) land.
That’s 50 total inches of rain in the space of less than a week. To call it unprecedented or remarkable actually doesn’t quite capture the situation.
The National Weather Service’s response to Harvey’s onslaught begins to put it in its proper perspective, though. The NWS literally had to remake the color-coded charts on their precipitation maps to represent the amount of rain fallen because the scale used before today only went to 15 inches.
#Harvey in perspective. So much rain has fallen, we’ve had to update the color charts on our graphics in order to effectively map it. pic.twitter.com/Su7x2K1uuz
— NWS (@NWS) August 28, 2017
Think about that for a second. When all is said and done, the total amount of rainfall from Hurricane Harvey may not be just off the charts, it may be off the charts three times over and then some.
Imagine an earthquake somehow three times as powerful as a 10.0 on the Richter scale (this is not thought to be physically possible given the known length of Earth’s faults) or perhaps a tornado with wind speeds so intense they cause a sonic boom. Both these ideas are silly, scientifically speaking, of course, but begin to illustrate how far outside the recent historical norm the rains being visited upon Texas are.
But there is another way to illustrate all that water without delving into the realms of science fiction.
When the waters finally begin to recede, some calculate that around 25 trillion gallons of water will have been dumped on the southeast corner of the Lone Star State. That’s equivalent to around the volume of the Great Salt Lake (pictured at the top of this post) times four.
In case you’re wondering, that lake is about 1,700 square miles in area, while the sprawling Houston area is just 627 square miles. And we haven’t even begun to discuss how deep the Great Salt Lake is (up to 34 feet).
In other words, when it comes to talking about the amount of water being visited upon Texas right now, we need new ways to even begin to visualize it, or at least some brand new charts.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.