If you want to get a feel for what some of the rain people are talking about is like, see if you can find a model of rainfall intensity for your area. A good pl

If you want to get a feel for what some of the rain people are talking about is like, see if you can find a model of rainfall intensity for your area. A good place to look is on the websites of your state government departments that have to deal with drainage and runoff. For example here in Washington that would be the Department of Transportation. They need to be estimate how often a given area will get X inches of rain over Y minutes for a range of X and Y in order to figure out things like how big a culvert they need to put under a road. That information is in chapter 2 of their hydraulics manual which the public can download [1]. When someone mentions some ungodly amount of rain in a flood area, such as the 8" in 6 hours mentioned in another comment, you can take that rate (1.33"/hr) and then see how often you expect to see that rate where you are and for how long. Doing that for my location, I expect to see 1.33"/hr every 2 years--but only for 8.5 minutes at a time. Every 5 years I can expect to see it for nearly 14 minutes. 18 minutes every 10 years. 25 minutes every 25 years. 32 minutes every 50 years. 38 minutes every 100 years. Basically, then, if I think back over the last couple of years or so and remember the worst 8 minutes of rain I had, and then imagine it going on for 6 hours instead of just being an 8 minute pulse I'll have some idea of how much freaking rain that was. Alternatively, I can see that I expect an interval of 6 hours with 0.19" of rain every 2 years, 0.24" every 5 years, 0.28" every 10 years, 0.33" every 25 years, 0.37" every 50 years, and 0.40" every 100 years. So people who got 8" in 6 hours got 20 times as much rain as people where I live expect to see in 6 hours if they live here their entire life. I'm curious what rates they get in those storms over shorter periods, such as 5 minutes. My tipping rain gauge takes about 100 ms to complete a tip, and it tips every 0.11", so if there was a spurt with intensity above 396"/hr it would not be able to keep up. Can those storms hit that over short intervals? [1] https://wsdot.wa.gov/engineering-standards/all-manuals-and-standards/manuals/hydraulics-manual https://wsdot.wa.gov/engineering-standards/all-manuals-and-s...