How much rain can a hurricane make, and does the storm size matter?

Answering an 8-year-old's question, a Georgia Tech atmospheric scientist explains that hurricane rainfall depends less on a storm's size than on how slowly it moves across land. Hurricane Harvey, which stalled over Houston in 2017, dropped an estimated 27 trillion gallons of water, enough to fill 40 million Olympic pools, with one Texas town receiving over 60 inches of rain across five days.

By contrast, Hurricane Michael, a more powerful Category 5 storm that moved quickly through the Florida Panhandle in 2018, brought only 6 to 10 inches of rain along its path. The piece notes storm size varies enormously too, from the 1,380-mile-wide Super Typhoon Tip in 1979 to Tropical Storm Marco's 23-mile diameter in 2008, but a slow, stalled storm of any size is the bigger rainfall risk.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.