ARS TECHNICA – As of Monday morning, if one wanted to grasp the historic nature of flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Helene in western parts of North Carolina and the surrounding areas, the logical place to begin is at the National Climatic Data Center.
This federal office maintains the world’s largest climate data archive and provides historical perspective to put present-day weather conditions and natural disasters into context in a warming world due to climate change.
Unfortunately, the National Climatic Data Center is based in Asheville, North Carolina. As I write this, the center’s website remains offline.
That’s because Asheville, a city in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, is the epicenter of catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Helene that has played out over the last week.
The climate data facility is inoperable because water and electricity services in the region have entirely broken down due to flooding.
At a news briefing this weekend, the governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, said flooding from the hurricane represented an “unprecedented” tragedy. Nearly half a million people remained without power, and hundreds of thousands of people lacked drinkable water.
At least three dozen people have died from the flooding, and videos have revealed apocalyptic damage in areas where dams failed and highways washed out.
So far from the coast
So how does a region nearly 500 miles from the Gulf of Mexico become devastated by flooding from a hurricane that originated there?
The answer is that Helene’s rapid movement inland—it was one of the fastest-moving storms at landfall in the Gulf of Mexico in recent history—created a massive river of atmospheric moisture and funneled it into parts of North Carolina, northern Georgia, and southeastern Tennessee.
We don’t have any definitive answers yet on how much moisture was sucked northward by Helene and dropped in a deluge on these areas …
