World Record for Rain? Missouri Town Hit with a Foot in an Hour

When your spouse is a meteorologist, you think you've heard it all when it comes to weather-related history. That's what I thought, but today I learned there was one Missouri weather fact I was unaware of. Did you know the world record for rainfall is held by a tiny Missouri place that was slammed with a foot in just an hour?

Get our free mobile app

Credit to A-Z Animals for doing the impossible: telling me a Missouri weather fact my wife hadn't mentioned. They documented a truly historic morning that happened in Holt, Missouri on June 22, 1947. Thanks to a freak weather system, tiny little Holt located just to the northwest of the Kansas City, Missouri area registered a whopping 12 inches of rain that fell like a flood from the sky.

What could cause such a deluge on a small Missouri town in just one hour of the morning?

Meteorologists using modern technology now think they know why. The American Meteorological Society just shared a paper with a theory of what happened that June morning of 1947 in Holt, Missouri. They said "this extremely heavy rain may have been produced by cold frontogenesis aloft (CFA). It is shown that what was earlier analyzed as a surface cold front was probably a dry trough, and that CFA was located at 700 hPa east of the dry trough, close to the location of the squall line, that produced the record precipitation rate."

This is me pretending I understand that meteorologist speak. Open Snow tried to explain better how troughs affect weather saying "This tends to result in cooler and more unsettled weather conditions." I would say that "unsettled" is a pretty good description of what the dry trough helped to foster the morning of June 22, 1947 when Holt, Missouri saw the sky drench them with unprecedented rainfall.