On the night of July 24th, 2022, University of Kentucky Professor Chris Barton remembers not going to sleep. He was watching the weather radar on his television.
“And this system was coming up into, you know, over Pine Mountain and into this area, and it almost looked like a freight train. It just kept coming and coming. I kept watching it, and I just knew immediately, this is going to be catastrophic.”
It was horrific. About 16 inches of rain swamped 13 Eastern Kentucky counties killing 45 people and destroying 9,000 thousand homes.
Barton is a U-K Professor of Forest Hydrology and Watershed Management. He says what happened in Eastern Kentucky is similar to the recent flooding disaster in North Carolina and Tennessee.
Barton says in both situations, extremely warm temperatures caused evaporation to hold massive amounts of water in the atmosphere.
“What happens is, when you have those extreme temperatures, one you get a lot of evaporation from, either the land surface or the water surface, as far as this year’s event, and it holds that up into the atmosphere. And the atmosphere can actually hold more water when it’s hotter. And in both instances, the same thing happened. Those atmospheric fronts moved northward and started to lift. And when they hit the mountainous regions of Kentucky in 2022 and North Carolina and Tennessee this year, the air lifts, it cools, and all that water is released. And unfortunately, the amount of water in those systems is just tremendous, and it overwhelms the system.”