Hurricane Debby Dumped Almost 10 Inches of Rain on Sarasota and Manatee Counties on Sunday—and It's Not Over Yet (2024)

Despite being miles offshore, Hurricane Debby dropped 9.52 inches of rain on Sarasota on Sunday, with more to come in the early part of this week. Throughout the region, the storm's rain, wind and storm surge flooded neighborhoods, cut off access to electricity and closed roads.

And while the Sarasota area was spared a direct hit—Debby made landfall near Steinhatchee around 7 a.m. this morning—the effects of the storm are having major impacts.

"This was a huge storm," says Bob Bunting, the founder and chief executive officer of Sarasota'sClimate Adaptation Center. According to the National Hurricane Center, hurricane-force winds extended up to 45 miles from Debby's eye, and tropical storm-force winds stretched outward for up to 140 miles."It matters where the eye of a storm goes when you're talking about catastrophic damage, because right around the center of the storm is where it's most fierce," says Bunting. "But what people don't understand is that even if the center misses you, there are still big impacts all around the storm. That's what we're seeing here."

Then there's all that rainfall, which even minor storms have been dropping a lot of lately. In June,3.93 inches of rain fell at Sarasota Bradenton International Airport in just one hour, the most to fall in one hour since records began being kept in 1972. Debby's rainfall on Sunday broke a daily record previously set in August 2017, and several more inches of rain are expected today and through the rest of the week.

There's a good reason for that, says Bunting. "The temperature of the Earth is now 1.7 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels," he says.

Bunting points out that for every degree the Earth's temperature rises, the atmosphere is able to hold 7 percent more water. "That's just physics," he says. At 1.7 degrees Celsius, that means the atmosphere is able hold close to 14 percent more water than during the pre-industrial era. "We feel this with the humidity, but when we get a storm, the air in this massive [atmospheric] area gets funneled into the storm and creates epic rain," says Bunting. "When you think about it, all of the storms we've had in the last few years have tended to be excessive in terms of precipitation: Hurricane Ian, the El Niño-related storms in December, the unnamed storm on June 11and now Hurricane Debby."

There's also the issue of sea level rise. "Since 2010, the sea level in Sarasota has risen 5 inches," Bunting says. "Since the 1950s, it's risen 9 to 10 inches. That means that when you get even minor storm surge, it's starting from a higher base. The land hasn't changed—that's where it's always been. It's the sea level that's higher, and we don't have the buffers we used to."

Debby's not done yet, either. Bunting says that we could see beach erosion and more flooding on the barrier islands in low-lying areas today. "Because the winds have been gale force for 12 hours, blowing water inland, we might see more significant flooding today than yesterday," he warns. "There are some places that are going to get 15 inches of rain by the end of this. That water takes a while to run off, and when it does, what's going to happen to our river systems? There's going to be some serious inland flooding around Southwest Florida for several days. The ferocity of the rain over the past few days has been pretty amazing."

Between the unnamed storm on June 11 (which, Bunting points out, had winds just 1 mile per hour short of tropical storm status) and now Debby, it almost feels like we've been through a full hurricane season already.

Unfortunately, peak season is just beginning.

"We're really going to have to be more vigilant," Bunting says. "We're seeing record kinds of storms in different ways this year, including Hurricane Beryl, which became the earliest Category 5 hurricane ever to form in the Atlantic."

"The only way we're going to get through it is if we change the way we do business on infrastructure," Bunting adds. "We can't live like it's 1980 anymore. The climate has already changed."