Climate Change Was The Engine That Powered Hurricane Maria's Devastating Rains

Hurricane Maria was the rainiest storm known to have hit Puerto Rico, and climate change is partly to blame, according to a new study.

The worst rain fell in the mountainous central part of Puerto Rico, from the northwest to the southeast. That part of the island is rainy under normal conditions. In an average year, it gets more than 150 inches of rain.

When Maria hit in 2017, it dropped nearly a quarter of that annual rainfall in just one day.

In a paper published Tuesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, scientists at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and Sonoma State University in California analyzed rainfall from all 129 hurricanes that have affected Puerto Rico since reliable record keeping began in 1956.

They found that Maria was a behemoth compared with past storms that raked the U.S. territory. The average amount of rain Maria dropped on the island in a day — about 15 inches — was 30 percent more than the previous record set by a tropical storm in 1985, and 66 percent more rain than fell on average during what was previously the largest and costliest storm to ever hit the island, 1998's Hurricane Georges.