Data: Climate Central; Note: Includes weather stations in cities with sufficient data quality; Chart: Kavya Beheraj/Axios
Rainstorms are getting more intense in many U.S. cities amid human-driven climate change, a new analysis finds.
Why it matters: More intense precipitation events can cause flash-flooding, landslides, dangerous driving conditions and other potentially deadly hazards.
Driving the news: Hourly rainfall intensity increased between 1970 and 2024 in nearly 90% of the 144 locations analyzed, per a new report from Climate Central, a research and communications group.
Among the cities with an increase, hourly rainfall intensity rose by an average of 15%.
Zoom in: In Miami, it was about 12%.
How it works: The researchers divided each location's total annual rainfall by its total hours of annual rainfall, using NOAA weather station data.
That approach quantifies how much rain fell for each hour it was raining in a given year — in other words, rainfall intensity.