Rainfall analysis of the May 2021 southeastern Texas and southern Louisiana flood

This map shows rainfall totals from the historic 2021 storm, with higher amounts in dark blue. Credit: NOAA Climate.gov

Investigators at the Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program (SCIPP), a NOAA Climate Program Office Climate Adaptation Partnerships (CAP) team, recently published an article discussing the 2021 historic rainfall event in Texas and Louisiana. The event produced 15-19.8 inches of rain across eastern Texas and southern Louisiana, with many locations receiving most of the storm total in just 6-12 hours. The extensive flooding led to over $1 billion in damage. In the paper, the SCIPP investigators discussed the synoptic setting of the rainfall event and compared it to another extreme precipitation event that affected southern Louisiana in August 2016. The paper, titled “Rainfall analysis of the May 2021 southeastern Texas and southern Louisiana flood,” was published in Physical Geography.