My little girl is 7 and just isn’t wrapping her head around this and I need to find a better way to explain this.
She is so so smart because she saw the coverage of Helene, and heard 17″ and hot confused.
I told her the water runs from the high places to the low places, but then she asked why the water doesn’t leave the low places and why is it still flooded.
I’m bad at dumbing things down.
In: Planetary Science
Say 17” (about 1.5 feet to simplify the number) of rain fall across an area that is 1 square mile. That’s an area of 27 million square feet. Times 1.5 feet of water gives you a total water volume of about 40 million cubic feet of water.
If all that land was perfectly flat, then yes you’re right, everywhere would just have 1.5 feet of water sitting on it. But that’s not have water works, land isn’t perfectly flat, it’s sloped, and water drains down into creeks and streams and rivers.
So if all that water drains down into river going through a valley that’s only 1,000 feet wide, that is 40 Million cubic feet of water (about 300 million gallons of water) flowing down all these streams and creeks into the valley. Causing the river in that valley to overflow its banks and flood the surrounding towns.
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