How does 10 inches of rainfall cause extreme flooding like what we are seeing in Kentucky?
In: 9091
10 inches on a hill, plus 10 inches in the valley turns into 20 inches in the valley very quickly.
But also, there may be a lot of hill above the valley, and 10 inches across many square miles of hill can result in a LOT more than merely 20 inches in the few square miles of a valley very quickly.
I lived about 30 foot from the creek. The creek normally is around 2 foot deep. The creek was raised to around 22-25 foot.
Think about it as snowfall, 1 inch of rain is the equivalent of 13 inches of snow. So that’s like getting 130 inches or nearly 11 ft of snow in one day.
Consider a box , 1 metre high, 1 metre wide, 1 metre deep. Now fill it with water. That’s a cubic metre of water, 1000 litres. Do you think you could lift it? Doesn’t sound like much right? Wrong. One litre weighs 1kg. That box will weigh around half as much as an average car, a metric tonne to be precise.
Now also consider what happens when a river bank fails and even a few thousand cubic metres of water are released, maybe only a few cm deep, but it’ll do so much damage. This is why you see bridges being slowly destroyed by flood waters (not even considering the debris inherent when floods sweep across the land).
Now consider what you’ve asked. 10 inches of water, across an entire region. That’s what I’d like to call a metric fuck tonne of water, it must have been mind bendingly heavy.
That’s me rambling a bit, but how about a video? [Here’s Richard Hammond crushing a car with 4 cubic metres of water while talking about exactly what you’re asking about](https://youtu.be/93nBQQyHDhc)
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