A lot of infrastructure is built for a lost world. Things like drainage and sewer systems were designed in many places for the kind of rainfall people had been observing since the cities were built — only that’s not what comes out of the sky today. An analysis published late last week from Climate Central shows what climate change is doing: more rain, falling faster and heavier, just about everywhere.
“Climate change is supercharging the water cycle,” according to the non-profit’s new work. This is unfolding basically as physics says it should: for every degree Fahrenheit of warming, the atmosphere can hold four percent more moisture, which means harder rain or snow when it falls. Climate Central analyzed the “simple hourly rainfall intensity index” — a fairly simple measure of the total annual rainfall divided by the total hours that rain fell — across 144 US cities.
They found that 126 of those cities, or 88 percent, have seen an increase in rainfall intensity between 1970 and 2024. The average increase was 15 percent, though there were some regional differences — a larger increase in intensity occurred in the upper midwest than anywhere else, though all nine climate regions saw an increase.
Some cities have seen truly remarkable rainfall intensity increases, in very different parts of the country. Wichita, Kansas, has seen a 38 percent increase since 1970; just below at 37 percent are Reno, Nevada; Fairbanks, Alaska; and El Paso, Texas. Other big movers include Sioux Falls, North Dakota, Toledo, Ohio, and Tucson, Arizona, among others.
This is, of course, going to get worse. With two degrees C of warming (3.6 degrees F), 85 percent of US counties will enjoy 10 percent more rain during the worst storms. Some places — Tennessee, Georgia, Maine, a few other states — will likely see a 30 percent increase. That means those bits of infrastructure will start failing, more often and more spectacularly, unless we slow warming down fast.
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