Hurricane Matthew has come and gone, but the storm’s torrential rains continue to have an effect on the southeastern United States. Flooding in North Carolina, for example, is the worst since Hurricane Floyd in 1999, according to news reports.
Matthew began dropping large amounts of rain while offshore from South America. As the category 4 storm curved northward, intense rainfall fell on Haiti and Cuba. By October 8, 2016, when Matthew made landfall northeast of Charleston, South Carolina, it had weakened to a category 1 storm. Its center stayed mostly offshore, but the storm surge from the ocean and the torrential rains caused damage from Florida to southeast Virginia.
This map depicts satellite-based measurements of rainfall from September 28 to October 10, 2016, as compiled by NASA. The rainfall totals are regional, remotely-sensed estimates, and local amounts can be significantly higher when measured from the ground.
Rainfall data come from the Integrated Multi-Satellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG), a product of the Global Precipitation Measurement mission. IMERG pulls together precipitation estimates from passive microwave and infrared sensors on several satellites, as well as monthly surface precipitation gauge data, to provide precipitation estimates between 60 degrees North and South latitude.
NASA Earth Observatory map by Jesse Allen, using IMERG data provided courtesy of the Global Precipitation Mission (GPM) Science Team’s Precipitation Processing System (PPS). Caption by Kathryn Hansen.
