If the year were to end today, Fort Lauderdale would be the wettest city of 2023 in the entire country.
Following the heavy rainfall, Fort Lauderdale is up to 101 inches of rain this year and what is even crazier is that the equipment broke at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and we don’t actually have an official rainfall total yet.
At this time, I'm reading 10.01 inches, but we are waiting on the official number.
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If that 10.01 holds up, and you add that to the 101 inches and we are at 111 inches. The all-time record is 102.36 inches from 1947.
We will break that easily with six weeks of the year left.
The 101 inches is nearly twice as much as a normal year through this point and twice as much as we had last year by this point.
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But 2023 has not been kind to the area.
Back in April, Fort Lauderdale experienced what some would consider the Florida Man of storms.
The end result was more than 25 inches of rain drenching and flooding Fort Lauderdale in six to eight hours.
That ranked among the top three in major U.S. cities over a 24-hour period, behind Hilo, Hawaii's, 27 inches in 2000 and Port Arthur, Texas's 26.5 inches in 2017, according to weather historian Chris Burt.
While it could happen in other places in coastal America, Florida has the right topography, plenty of warm water nearby and other favorable conditions, said Greg Carbin, forecast branch chief at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center.
Just two days before the downpour, Weather Prediction Center forecaster David Roth told colleagues that conditions were lining up similar to April 25, 1979, when 16 inches of rain fell on Fort Lauderdale, Carbin said.
What parked over Fort Lauderdale on Wednesday was a supercell — the type of strong thunderstorm that can spawn killer tornadoes and hail and plows across the Great Plains and Mid-South in a fierce, fast-moving but short path of destruction, several meteorologists said.
