We were lucky, Monday night's torrential rainfall had somewhere to go
SOUTH BEND, Ind -- Two to more than four inches of rain fell across portions of St. Joseph and LaPorte counties, from midday Monday through Tuesday morning. This same system cause flash flooding in parts of Northwest Indiana and Chicagoland.
24 Hour Rainfall Totals 8/18 to 8/19/25
A four-inch rainfall use to be rare, but has now become a regular occurrence, each summer. This is a direct link to climate change. A warmer atmosphere holds more water. What goes up, must come down.
To Monday night's rainfall in perspective, if four inches of rain had fallen at the South Bend airport -- the official climate reporting site with over 100 years of data -- it would have been one of the top ten wettest days ever, and there have only been five days in recorded history with more than four inches of rain. However, 4/5 of those extreme rainfall days have come since 2008.
The wettest of wettest days are becoming more extreme. There's been a 45% increase in rainfall totals in the top 1% of wettest days in the Midwest. We were lucky this summer has been fair dry up until this point, and the water had some place to go. Had the area already been saturated, the results could have been much worse.