How many gallons of water does a hurricane hold?

Answer 1

Per the following USGS resource site, an average rainstorm covering 50 square miles, with one inch of rain, is the equivalent to nearly a billion gallons of water. http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/sc2.html (by jay-at-connectcetera-dot-com)

Answer 2

This is hard to answer. First, the obvious disclaimers: hurricanes come from the small to the very, very large. Even a relatively benign category 1 hurricane, like Isaac (2012), can cover a huge area; additionally, hurricane clouds generally top out significantly higher than most other storm clouds. I've seen estimates of 108 billion pounds which would come to roughly 50 billion kg., or 13 billion gallons. Personally, I think that's a bit on the low side. A solid hurricane can have tropical storm force winds (and presumably rainfall) extend well over a hundred miles from the eye; 4" (10 cm.) of rain from a hurricane I have to think would be a reasonable minimum for the area being covered. Simple math, then, gives us 4" x 100 mi. radius (squared) x 3.14 (pi)... (okay, converting to metric for ease): .1m * 160,000m * 160,000m * 3.14 = 8,038,400,000 -- and that's in cubic meters, which, since we're roughing this, comes to about 8 billion tons in both metric and English. Or two trillion gallons -- significantly more than NPR's estimate. My math may be wrong for some reason, but I'd be very interested in hearing their rationale.

Answer 3

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