Heavy rain can be just as dangerous as droughts

Published August 17, 2018 This content is archived.

An article in Popular Science about climate change and the dangers posed by the rise in extreme precipitation events that experts predict will only get worse interviews Nicholas Rajkovich, assistant professor of architecture, who discussed a storm that rolled through Buffalo on Aug. 8, dropping 1.5 inches of rain in just 30 minutes. The event fell somewhere between a 25-year and 50-year precipitation event, he said, meaning that the likelihood of rainfall like what he experienced occurring in 24-hour period in any given year was between roughly 2 and 4 percent. “There’s a lot of negative consequences to heavy, heavy rainfall,” Rajkovich said. “If it was more rainfall spread out evenly over the course of the year, that might not be so bad. But that’s not what we’re seeing.”