What parked over Fort Lauderdale on Wednesday — leading to record rainfalls amounts for the Florida city — was a supercell, the type of strong thunderstorm that can spawn killer tornadoes and hail in a fierce, fast-moving but short path of destruction, several meteorologists have said.
The end result was more than 63.5 centimetres of rain drenching and flooding Fort Lauderdale in six to eight hours. That ranked among the top three in major U.S. cities over a 24-hour period, behind 68.5 centimetres in Hilo, Hawaii, in 2000 and 67.3 centimetres in Port Arthur, Texas, in 2017, according to weather historians.
“For context,
