Currently — June 6th, 2022

June 05, 2022

The weather, currently.

Before officially becoming Tropical Storm Alex — the first named tropical system of the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season — a record-setting deluge fell on Miami over the weekend.

The intense rains created extensive flash flooding, displacing thousands of people and creating scenes of floating cars, people wading through waist-deep water, and even more surreal moments like a dog surfing (yes, really) and a school of fish making their way through a flooded parking garage.

A recently upgraded pump-and-drainage system in Miami Beach, designed to handle the more intense rainstorms that are already occurring due to climate change, did not meet expectations.“We moved the water off pretty quickly, but in some areas, obviously, it was really challenging,” Miami Beach mayor Dan Gelber told the Associated Press. Elsewhere in the region, residents said officials did not do enough to clear storm drains before the well-predicted rains arrived. The heavy rains also created sewage overflows which shut down the region’s beaches.The “potential tropical cyclone” dropped more than 10 inches of rain on Miami in two days — the biggest rainstorm during the first half of hurricane season in Miami in nearly 100 years.

According to meteorologists Bob Henson and Jeff Masters, “[t]he two-day rainfall total (June 3-4) of 8.65″ at Miami was its heaviest two-day rainfall in any meteorological summer (June-August) since 10.33″ fell on August 29-30, 1932.”Unofficially, some measurements from backyard rain gauges were even higher (including Currently’s John Morales, who measured nearly a foot).

June is typically Miami’s rainiest month, with an average of 6.3 inches falling each year. What’s now Tropical Storm Alex brought that much rain in less than two days.

Alex is moving quickly over the western Atlantic now, and will pass very near Bermuda on Monday.

What you need to know, currently.

Currently’s Rebecca McCarthy wrote a piece last week on the man who began naming hurricanes after people,

“In 1902, a man named Clement Wragge aimed a cannon at the sky in Queensland, Australia and hoped for rain. Wragge was a visionary freak among meteorologists — orphaned at the age of five, he was trained in cosmology and meteorology by his grandmother and would later become quite interested in spiritualism. By most accounts, he was a foul-mouthed, short-tempered man, with a turbulent personal life and an unlikely relationship with Brigham Young, but today he’s generally regarded as one of the more influential figures in weather forecasting.”