From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
This is not just BS, but fraudulent BS!
Officials called Hurricane Helene’s deadly rainfall and floods “biblical” and “generational.” But weather forecasters used another term: “once in 1,000 years.”
Helene was actually the second once-in-a-millennium storm to strike North Carolina in a matter of days. Less than two weeks before Helene made landfall, an unnamed tropical storm brought 1,000-year rains to communities on the opposite side of the state, inundating homes along the coast.
The idea of two such rainfall events occurring back-to-back might seem confusing. After all, it sounds like they should only occur every 1,000 years. But in reality, it’s all about probability. Understanding the odds — and how climate change is shifting them — is more important than ever for communities and infrastructure managers.
Researchers were able to definitively identify these two extremely rare deluges in North Carolina based on rainfall frequency estimates. Using years of precipitation measurements for a specific place, scientists extrapolate what constitutes a hundred-year storm, for example, for that location.
Add in the effects of climate change — which are not included in current estimates — and the likelihood of catastrophic rains increase, said Daniel Swain, a climatologist at the University of California Los Angeles. A hotter atmosphere can hold additional moisture, which is driving more frequent and intense downpours.
Take Helene’s rains. While they were a 1,000-year event using statistical estimates based on the historic record, a rapid analysis in the wake of the storm found that rains as severe as Helene’s now occur about once every 70 years due to global warming.
So, North Carolina had two “one-in-1000 years “ rainstorms in two weeks? Really?
Sorry but this must be called out for the absolute fraud it is.
Let’s start with Helene.
Storm rainfall in the worst affected part of North Carolina was for the most part below 20 inches, although a small handful of high altitude sites recorded slightly higher than that.
http://web.archive.org/web/20240930152623/https://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/discussions/nfdscc4.html
However these total were steadily accumulated over three days, for instance at Asheville:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/10/03/hurricane-helene-update/
However in 1916, we know that 22 inches fell in exactly the same area in just 24-hours, still a record for the whole of the US.
Plainly the Helene floods were not unprecedented.
And what about that other storm:
This refers to the small rainstorm which dumped 10 inches of rain on a short length of coast around Southport, NC on 17th September. I covered the story here.
http://climod2.nrcc.cornell.edu/
But again, ten inches in a day along the coast of the Carolinas is pretty much par for the course, when a tropical storm passes by.
The 24-hour record for South Carolina, for instance, stands at 14.8 inches during Hurricane Floyd in 1999:
But North Carolina was even more badly affected by Floyd, according to Wikipedia:
North Carolina received the brunt of the storm’s destruction. In all, Hurricane Floyd caused 51 fatalities in North Carolina, much of them from freshwater flooding, as well as billions in damage.
The storm surge from the large hurricane amounted to 9–10 ft (2.7–3.0 m) along the southeastern portion of the state. The hurricane also spawned numerous tornadoes, most of which caused only minor damage. Damage to power lines left over 500,000 customers without electricity at some point during the storm’s passage.[2]
Just weeks prior to Floyd hitting, Hurricane Dennis brought up to 15 in (380 mm) of rain to southeastern North Carolina. When Hurricane Floyd moved across the state in early September, it produced torrential rainfall, amounting to a maximum of 19.06 in (484 mm) in Wilmington. Though it moved quickly, the extreme rainfall was due to Floyd’s interaction with an approaching cold front across the area.[2]
Extensive flooding, especially along NC Hwy 91 and the White Oak Loop neighborhood, led to overflowing rivers; nearly every river basin in eastern North Carolina reached 500 year or greater flood levels.[33] Most localized flooding happened overnight; Floyd dropped nearly 17 in (430 mm) of rain during the hours of its passage and many residents were not aware of the flooding until the water came into their homes. The U. S. Navy, National Guard and the Coast Guard performed nearly 1700 fresh water rescues of people trapped on the roofs of their homes due to the rapid rise of the water. By contrast, many of the worst affected areas did not reach peak flood levels for several weeks after the storm, as the water accumulated in rivers and moved downstream (see flood graphic at right).
The passage of Hurricane Irene four weeks later contributed an additional 6 in (150 mm) of rain over the still-saturated area, causing further flooding.
The Tar River suffered the worst flooding, exceeding 500-year flood levels along its lower stretches; it crested 24 ft (7.3 m) above flood stage. Flooding began in Rocky Mount, as much as 30% of which was underwater for several days. In Tarboro, much of the downtown was under several feet of water.[34] Nearby, the town of Princeville was largely destroyed when the waters of the Tar poured over the town’s levee, covering the town with over 20 ft (6.1 m) of floodwater for ten days.[35] Further downstream, Greenville suffered very heavy flooding; damages in Pitt County alone were estimated at $1.6 billion (1999 USD, $2.81 billion 2022 USD).[13] Washington, where the peak flood level was observed, was likewise devastated. Some residents in Greenville had to swim six feet underwater to reach the front doors of their homes and apartments.[36] Due to the heavy flooding in downtown Greenville, the East Carolina Pirates were forced to relocate their football game against #9 Miami to N.C. State‘s Carter–Finley Stadium in Raleigh, where they beat the Hurricanes 27–23.[37]
The Neuse River, Roanoke River, Waccamaw River, and New River exceeded 500-year flood levels, although damage was lower in these areas (compared to the Tar River) because of lower population densities. Because most of the Cape Fear River basin was west of the peak rainfall areas, the city of Wilmington was spared the worst flooding despite having the highest localized rainfall; however, the Northeast Cape Fear River (a tributary) did exceed 500-year flood levels. Of the state’s eastern rivers, only the Lumber River escaped catastrophic flooding.[33]
Rainfall and strong winds affected many homes across the state, destroying 7,000, leaving 17,000 uninhabitable, and damaging 56,000. Ten thousand people resided in temporary shelters following the storm. The extensive flooding resulted in significant crop damage. As quoted by North Carolina Secretary of Health and Human Services H. David Bruton, “Nothing since the Civil War has been as destructive to families here. The recovery process will be much longer than the water-going-down process.”[13] Around 31,000 jobs were lost from over 60,000 businesses through the storm, causing nearly $4 billion (1999 USD, $7.02 billion 2022 USD) in lost business revenue.[38] In much of the affected area, officials urged people to either boil water or buy bottled water during Floyd’s aftermath.[39]
In contrast to the problems eastern North Carolina experienced, much of the western portion of the state remained under a severe drought.[13
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Floyd#Southeastern_United_States
Floyd dumped 19 inches on Wilmington, and this was not untypical of the wider area.
Note also the reference to Hurricane Dennis, which dropped 15 inches on the same region just weeks earlier. This certainly gives the lie to Bloomberg’s story that two such events are just not supposed to happen.
NOAA published the rainfall totals for the 33 days encompassing both storms. Wilmington, for example, received 28 inches:
.
In Wilmington, 18 inches fell in two days during Floyd.
Dennis, meantime, had already dropped 19.91 inches, mostly in the last two days of August:
https://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/tropical/rain/dennis1999.html
Floyd and Dennis were both exceptional, but many other tropical storms have dropped as much rain as that seen in Southport last month.
So where do they get this “one in a thousand year” nonsense from?
Yes, I realise that it does not literally mean once every thousand years – it is merely a statement of probability. You can win the lottery, but that does not mean there is no chance of winning it again.
But nevertheless, there must be something fundamentally wrong with their models, if they are coming up with such results.
Indeed, even the scientists who came up with this crock of nonsense admit that the claims are based on “the historic record”. Plainly the “historic record” does not support their claims. They are no more than statistical jiggery-pokery, intended to mislead.
If it is based on the historical record, they can only tell us about the situation in the last hundred years or so. In other words, the once every 70 years they mention, which given that these are based on individual locations is probably accurate. It also implies that the US will likely see this sort of event somewhere every year.
But, based on the historic record, they have no way of knowing how frequent these events were before “global warming”. And this is where the models are twisted to provide whatever results the authors are looking for – that is, a 1000-year event.
The whole objective is to frighten the public into believing that weather is any worse than it has always been:
It is not just poor science, it is deliberate disinformation.
I’m in favor of returning “outright, self-serving lie” to the vocabulary. Disinformation is five syllables.
Good presentation of a Reality Check by Paul Homewood. Although geologists are taught some general guidelines about frequency of various floods, there is not any specific formula. Many times I have researched and written a report about the Fatal Flaws section enroute to an acquisition or not recommendation. When you see horizontal changes in vegetation along a valley, or benches of perched gravel bars, etc, much higher than the potential project, buyer beware. Sorry about the destruction of Helene and Milton, but nothing unusual in their effects.
Especially in such large drainage areas.
Back when I was studying to be an engineer, (civil+), the method of calculating the rare events was to get a large sample and FIT an F-curve to the data. Once you have the features of the F-curve, you can extend out to determine the rarer events.
Of course, it all goes pear shaped if firstly, the data is NOT F distributed. And secondly, if your data set is tainted or possibly even reflective of TWO combined sets of independent events.
As an example. Let’s say a town inland of Florida has a rainfall intensity that needs to be assessed from the current 100 years of data, extrapolating out to 1000 year. BUT, let’s suppose that there are TWO sources of rainfall, one from the south, blowing over the gulf, the other from points further west, actually a Pacific ocean based storm.
If you ignore the two sources, just blend the data, you end up with TWO overlapping F distribution curves. NOT the one that is classic and which could allow analysis out to the required rare events.
It’s ignorance of these multi modal data sets, (or of a step change in the data), and forcing it to fit a single peaked F-distribution that can lead to poor outcomes.
Similar, how many people have claimed a significance of 3+ standard deviations on data that doesn’t even conform to a normal distribution? A test for the distribution shape and compliance should always be performed first.
I recall a document studying the transit times of barges to a construction site. The data was analysed, astandard deviation calculated and a bold statement made that 99% could be delivered in plus or minus 3 SD of the mean. It never occurred to the author that minus 3sd was actually before the barge left the origin port. And that report was approved by management with what I could best describe as NFI.
We did same in my 1970’s CE education, but fit to Gumbel Distribution, using special graphing paper which was designed for Gumbel.
Explained numerous internet places and in books, esp. for those on Hydrology.
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/GumbelDistribution.html
TheGeoModels
https://www.youtube.com/@TheGeoModels/videos
A very professional view on this flood situation.
We all love our beaches. Reality is that most beaches are made by mountains. Only extreme events can move enough sediments to keep our beaches and deltas alive.
Another major storm event I followed was roughly the 1% AEP ( or 1 in 100 years – but really means 1% every year). I heard one elected Chair of the catchment board describe this storm that took a number of bridges as 5 time more river flow than a 5%/1 in 20 years.
I didnt have the river flow numbers for that river , but I found another catchment board who had them and the difference between 1% storm and 5% storm river flow was roughly 1/3 more. I got no reply when I emailed her with the data and the suggestion her own people would have the exact numbers for that river
Some people in authority should stay out of mathematics. It’s just not for them.
Imagine going through life thinking that an exceedance value of 1 in 20 is represented by a flow being 20% of the 1 in 100 exceedance value.
Simple people, simple mistakes.
They should stay out of authority (no smiley face here, I am deadly serious).
If it was truly “Biblical”, who’d be around to report it?
Lot’s of flooding the area doesn’t usually see for sure.
But unlike the cause of the “Biblical” flood, Man had nothing to do with this.
All these “climate gurus” that say “biblical” .. haven’t built an Arc.
So they are not being serious. 🙂
Not 1 in 1,000 of those climate gurus has ever seen a Bible, much less read one.
“If it was truly ‘Biblical’ . . .”
Ahhhhh . . . is the implication that the Bible is (a) a historically-accurate accounting of past events, or (b) a scientifically-accurate reporting of past or predicted future events?
If so, I don’t believe there is any mention whatsoever of either “climate change” or “global warming” in the Bible, so what are we to make of that???
To understand whether an action is ‘once in an ‘x’ action, you would have to have 10’x’ data first. Standard mathematical practice is to have 10X the data in order to establish the ‘x in x’ criteria. I realize that they may have had soil samples to establish the last 1000 years, but not the last 10,000 years, which is what it would take to have a 1 in 1000 year event.
A few years ago, the same clowns claimed the Mississippi did a 500 year flood twice in the same month. We should not see that level of flooding for another 500 years. Anyone wanna bet on that?
It’s worse now because automobiles were never flooded 500 years ago.
@lauren Riosenthal….you still go it wrong.From the USGS they define a 1000 year flood “The term “1,000-year flood” means that, statistically speaking, a flood of that magnitude (or greater) has a 1 in 1,000 chance of occurring in any given year. In terms of probability, the 1,000-year flood has a 0.1% chance of happening in any given year.” I should note that it is entirely possible to have more than 1 in year. Furthermore, the next year has the exact same probability of it happening again.
(my bold added)
0.1% chance is .001 (1/1,000) chance of occurring. [1 (1/1) is a 100% chance. 0.1 (1/10) is a ten percent chance. 0.01 (1/100) is a one-hundredth percent chance.]
Dave; A 1% chance of something happening means the probablility is 0.01 therefore a 0.1% chance of an occurance means the probablity of the event occuring is 0.001. The USGS has their numbers right
I had hydrology in undergraduate studies in 1993 and hydrology and watershed studies in two classed as part of my PhD classwork (2003). Storm hydrograph analysis is mostly unchanged. What has changed are the watersheds. As more development occurs there is less vegetation to slow the water flow down. This is similar to friction surface analysis of inclined planes. There are coefficients used for in watershed analysis. More development means faster runoff in to the same streams. This creates higher flow rates with more flooding. Increases in 1000 storms frequency usually means increased rainfall and/or more development reducing vegetation which increases flooding potential. New analysis should be conducted to update the change in flooding frequency and calculate new watershed flooding probabilities.
Every time there are floods the news media always miss reports what a 100 or 1,000 year flood actually means. “Biblical flooding” creates more attention and attracts more views.
George….I entirely agree with you. As part of my graduate engineering studies in engineering geology, we had to calculate the recurrance interval of the 1972 Rapid City flood.If my memory is correct, that flood had a recurrence interval of 1in 854years. It was truly an outlier. As you say…, a re-analysis of the Rapid Creek drainage basin in the 50+ years since would probably produce an
entirely different result
And this is at that particular river.
There are river systems all over the world, so 1:1000 event can happen somewhere very often.
As I was taught in 1970’s Civil Engineering Hydrology courses.
The utter lack of scientific rigour at so many levels with these sort of claims about extreme weather events never ceases to amaze me.
Take rainfall at a locality. That is a compound of the size and intensity of the rain event itself and the time it takes for said event to pass the locality. The latter factor is an outcome of the broader weather-pressure pattern for hundreds if not thousands of miles around which is quite independent of the system itself.
We had a similar situation in Lismore, New South Wales a couple of years ago when a system came in from the west, generated by the then Indian Ocean polarity (similar to the El Nino – La Nina in the Pacific) met with easterly winds on the east coast that created very slow (easterly) system movement and hence it being above the town for significantly longer than normal. ‘Climate Change’s’ role? – zip, nada, nix, nil (except in certain religious circles that is).
Similarly, much of Lismore is built on the local river’s flood plain… So what happens when you put a whole lot of rectangular boxes and comparable infrastructural objects on a flood plain when it is in flood? Well it slows down the flow rate, lengthening the flood period, raising the flood level ( via Bernoulli’s relationship), creating greater pressure on vertical surfaces and faster flow throught the remnant flow area. Climate change’s role?. – zip, nada, nix, nil.
What happens when you say quadruple the human population by a factor of four or more over a century, they tend to live in low lying fertile valleys ( flood plains) and ocean foreshores and also have a much higher standard of living with associated infrastructure, both private and public? The damage cost from floods or similar storm surge events goes through the roof which compounds with the weather event severity not to mention the advent of a visual drama addicted media capable of instant and world wide distribution of same with melodramatic voice over and you get the perfect storm of propaganda service a set of self interests.
Same same for Florida, Georgia to NC, India, Africa. South America in fact would you believe it, the whole tropical-temperate planet. How do I know this as an incontravertible fact? Flood Plains exist ergo….
Chicken Little said the sky was falling over and over and convinced all her friends. They went to tell the king and met foxy loxy who offered to take them there. But he took them instead to his den and they were never seen again.
That story is not 1000 years old yet, but is pushing 250.
But hey, no one is complaining about light pollution in Cuba now.
NOAA establishes rainfall depth-duration frequency curves, which are rather complicated, based upon regional historical rainfall data. The lower threshhold for minimum data record is 30 years. A given depth of rainfall at a specified intensity in inches/hour over a specified duration in minutes-hours-days occurs probalistically at a specified frequency (1 yr, 5 yr, 25 yr, 100 yr, etc.).
These curves are routinely used by civil engineers for analysis and design of stormwater management structures like dams, levies, ponds, ditches, etc. and for development of flood elevations used for siting structures like buildings, homes, etc.
It is important to understand several concepts about these curves that nobody in the media and even relatively few educated persons understand:
1) Being regional the curves do not account for the size of given watershed where a rain gauge is located … a very small watershed can experience radically high rainfall depths or intensities that are not representative of the larger watersheds of which they are part. If a particular rain gage reports a 1,000 year storm for a specified storm duration, it is likely an extremely localized event that does not reflect the wider area. It may make for dramatic headlines, but is not as significant as it sounds.
2) The relationship between rainfall depths and return periods is not proportional. The 1,000 yr storm for a given watershed and duration is far less than 10 times the 100 yr depth.
3) The return period is a function of both depth and duration together.
Table 12.12 on P. 90 of Chapter 12 of Working Group One’s (WGI…the science group) contribution to the 2021 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) shows there has been no increase in extreme weather. Make the climate liars respond to that.
Also, odds are often misrepresented as the probability of something happening when it is more often just the odds of predicting something happening correctly. Statistically high odds never prevented anything from happening. Take the list of names posting in this comment section. What are the odds that the first twenty names would be these particular names and in this particular order? Astronomically unlikely yet, here we are.
People learning how to do statistical analysis could get useful advice about a set of numbers if they are taught, as I was, “First, understand your distribution.”
When one examines historic rainfall at a location, one should examine how it is distributed over time and place. If one suggests a probability of one in a thousand years for an event, one has to use the distribution to see if that is possible or plausible.
Many people roughly assume distributions to be smooth and of the typical “normal” or “bell” shape. This will lead to errors if the numbers do not cooperate. Take the hypothetical case that rainfall at a place has an upper limit created by physical effects. For example, the ability of the air to hold moisture that becomes rain is not infinite. There is an upper limit on daily rainfall that is complicated by movement so that air can move to that place, dump rain, then move on, so wind direction and velocity are confounding factors. This is further affected by temperature, more moisture in warmer air. More complications come from the concentration of particles that seed rainfall, usually not measured case by case.
A statistical analysis has to predict and account for limits to the distribution of numbers and confounding factors that can make them seem to do things that they cannot.
A record daily rainfall in one place can be ho-hum for another. The numbers in this article for Asheville are 17.6 inches over 3 days, average (say) 6 inches per day. Compare this with the rainfall RECORD DAILY summary from the little town of Tully in North Queensland.
………………………
Jan 30 2010 4.9 inches of rain in the day
Feb 5 2011 4.6 inches
March 4 1954 10.4 inches
April 23 1950 9.3
May 27 2007 12.2
June 9 2017 18.1
July 4 2011 15.7
August 6 2018 27.6 inches in the day, the highest on Tully record
Sept 21 2003 12.5
Oct 7 1964 8.1
Nov 22 1921 6.2
Dec 1 1921 4.8 inches in the day.
……………………….
Maybe the message is that context has to be taken into account, as well as the fine details of the actual statistical distribution.
Geoff S
The Met Office has been on this tack for some time in Britain. The naming of normal weather events gives drama, cold weather has disappeared from commentary and dire warnings for health given if the weather exceeds 25C. Thunderstorms have received special mention and the reports predict flooding although flooding is a mark of civil engineering failures, the same inundations in the same places due to under investment. They could equally predict the ejection of untreated sewage into our waterways but that would be too self-evidently the failure of overall domestic problems. Weather is treated as malign and only serves to denote the misspending of funds on a fictitious war on the elements rather than spend on amelioration that would work no matter what the climate is doing, a naming of self-harm rather than climate. Bjorn Lomborg holds the view that money spent on the projections as an allowance for anything that might occur is sound spend, we work to become well off and comfortable. When Clare Coutino (an opposition MP) challenged the Minister for energy and climate change it quickly became clear that the spend was uncosted and ill thought out. It was more an anti capitalist gesture than anything cogent. Lomburg attacks impoverishment that results in current measures. With wealth creation we can facedown any of even the worst of the imaginative outcomes dreamt up. When weather professionals, public servants, can be marshalled to tell their public half truths it is scandalous and embroils good people in a manifest lie that undermines their integrity encourages condescension. The IPCC sees no problem but we suffer the deliberate contortions of limited intelligence and an overall collapse in the morality. In Britain, Quangos control the narrative, they are beyond the public’s gaze, stocked with a fanatical desire to push a particular subjective view of energy and weather, it is their job, which they self evidently want to preserve to the contradiction of any truth that science and perseverance can summon.
Tonga eruption put 13% more moisture into the upper atmosphere. It will take about 4 years for it to dissipate.
OK, so you say.
Meanwhile, life (and climate) on Earth’s surface goes on.
The work of Hurst, who established clustering of flood events on the Nile over a record covering almost 9 centuries means that we should expect clustering of flooding events anyway.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02626667.2015.1125998#abstract
From the above article’s fourth-to-last paragraph:
“The whole objective is to frighten the public into believing that weather is any worse than it has always been”
Yes, exactly . . . but that’s just a subset of this sage warning from over 100 years ago:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
― H.L. Mencken, 1921
If anyone disagrees with the scientific arguments for global warming, please submit your reappraisals to the appropriate scientific journals. I suggest: The Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, the International Journal of Climatology, the Journal of Atmospheric Chemistry, and Nature, among others. Your arguments will be carefully and expertly peer-reviewed. Work that involves misleading or erroneous arguments or that does not properly cite its references will be rejected. Do not expect to be taken seriously until you show, using accepted experimental and analytical techniques, that you have a credible explanation for the data on climate change. The world’s scientific community awaits your response.
YAWN.. Consensus is NOT science.
You still haven’t produced a single bit of empirical scientific evidence of warming by atmospheric CO2.
Surely one of the consensus virtue-seeking journals must have the required evidence.. OR NOT !!!
Would you like to produce it… or just make mindless anti-science gibberish statements.
Methinks you have no idea of the degree to which “peer-review” is superfluous today. I humbly suggest you Google that fact.
Ummmm . . . would that be along the lines of Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” data, graph and his related conclusions . . . or perhaps more like Al Gore’s ridiculous claims in “An Inconvenient Truth” (which helped him win a Nobel Peace Prize, imagine that) . . . or perhaps even as exemplified by the IPCC’s regularly laughable Coupled Model Intercomparison Projects (CMIPs) which repeatedly show that 30-something different supercomputer climate model disagree with one another over about 10 years future prediction by a factor of about 8:1 and which, furthermore, on average over the last 10 years have disagreed with actual measured trending of atmospheric temperature rise rates by a factor of about 3 too high?
Is that what you mean by being “taken seriously”?
At least one WUWT commenter awaits your response.
Warren, you conflate “science” with “scientists” as if they’re the same thing.
There is no reason whatsoever for me to engage further with someone who really believes such, let alone asserts that such is now a “foundation of climate science”.
ROTFLMAO.
At no time did I claim or infer such. But I concur wholeheartedly!
ROTFLMAO^2!
Really . . . any objective “read” of the attached graph from CMIP5 runs clearly falsifies your sophomoric statement. Note: the discrepancy of models vs. reality has gotten worse since 2018 . . . the average of the models is now about 3x too high compared to scientific data measurements. The IPCC clearly learns nothing from its past mistakes.
ROTFLMAO^3!
That because your graph is a manipulated graphic circulating among other Deniers on the internet, and is not from the actual scientific reports on the CMIPs.
Regarding Dr Mann, you cant cite one peer reviewed study that contradicts Dr Mann’s work.
I despise the over hype of weather as some sort of unicorn-type of mystery.
In addition, the ignorance of posting some rain gauge totals and stating it was just a few high elevations that recorded immense precipitation is almost as bad. Why?
The Blue Ridge Escarpment is unique and impacts weather in ways we can’t always see. Secondly, Hendersonville is not in the elevations! It has the French Broad River and the Green River flowing through its area. Lastly – and most importantly for the topographic illiterate, Boone to Hendersonville is roughly 100+ miles, with huge areas of National Forest over 3000’ elevation cresting with Mount Mitchell at 6684’. Gauges 100 miles apart reported tremendous amounts of rain, it only makes sense that the thousands of acres on the southeast side of the Escarpment and areas in close proximity also received that and more. The Tuckasegee River in Jackson and Swain counties crested higher that the previous all-time high in Bryson City – why? Because the elevations from Cashiers to Richland Balsam were hammered with torrential rains, but were spared the worst. I live here. Call out the hype, but acknowledge the ignorance too. If you do not know the mountains don’t make statements that display it and allow it to stand. It makes skeptics look bad.