For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman.

With summer heat domes slamming down on parts of the U.S. and hurricane season ramping up,

you've no doubt seen plenty of extreme weather stories in your feed over the last few weeks.

Joining me today to demystify a few of those headlines is Andrea Thompson, a senior news editor for sustainability at Scientific American.

Thanks so much for coming on to chat with us.

Thanks for having me.

So let's go over some of the topics that people might see trending in the headlines a lot during this time of year.

We'll start with flash flooding.

Could you tell us a little bit about what happened in Texas and how it was possible for these floods

to become so dangerous so quickly? Yeah, so flash flood, it's, you know, sort of in the name,

it happens really quickly and often takes people by surprise.

It happens when you have really intense rains over a fairly small area, usually over a relatively

short time span.

And that's basically what happened in Texas.

There's between 6 to 10 inches of rain in 3 hours, which is a lot of rain.

And basically the ground just can't absorb

that much water that quickly. And it can be exacerbated by other aspects. You know, in cities,

you have a lot of pavement, a lot of asphalt, and those are impermeable to water. So water is going to

collect even more than it would on, you know, soil.

And then topography can play a role too.

And in Texas, this was an area with a lot of riverbeds, a lot of steep topography that basically funnels all that water down into one area.

And in this case, you know, in one spot in Hunt, Texas, the water rose 26 feet in 45 minutes on the Guadalupe River, which is just an incredible amount.

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