Ask Mr. Answer Person: Michael asks, "Was the 5 inches of rain in a short period of time we received last Monday any kind of record?"

Michael e-mails: "Was the 5 inches of rain in a short period of time we received on Monday any kind of record? If not what is the most rain in a short period of time Decorah has ever received?"

Mr. Answer Person says, "This question is WAY beyond my abilities to solve!  Fortunately, there's someone in Decorah who is much smarter than me--you might call him "Mr. Weather Answer Person," Luther College professor Richard Bernatz.

We posed your question to him--and here's what he said:

"Rainfall for Decorah is recorded on a 24-hour basis.  That is, the gauge is read once every 24 hours, not every hour.  Therefore, it is difficult to compare event intensities (such as inches/hour) based on the Decorah data record.

However, over the last 11 years (2004-2014), for the months May-October, I have maintained a recording rain gauge network of between 6 to 15 gauges spread out over the Upper Iowa River watershed upstream from Decorah.  These gauges record the time of day (to the nearest half-second) every 1/100 of an inch of rainfall occurs at the gauge site. The time stamp allows me to determine when an event begins, its duration, and how much rainfall was "captured" at the site for that event. I compile statistics on the rainfall events for each of the gauge sites. There have been something like 5,500 site events recorded over these 11 years.

My quick visual survey of event intensity shows there have been several events with intensities of about 2.0 inches per hour (It would take some time for me to drill down in the data to determine the exact time and location of these events).  I have yet to download data from this season, so I do not have any specifics on the June 22nd event.  However, if a site did receive about 5 inches of rain over a two hour period, the resulting 2.5 inch/hour intensity would easily surpass any I have observed in my data set so far.

Disclaimer: These numbers are not "official" in any way. I use these data for objectives other than establishing records of "extreme" events."

(Thanks, Richard Bernatz, for your answer to our reader question.  It's one more example of why we say Mr. A.P.'s real name ought to be "Mr. Doesn't Know the Answer, but Knows Someone Who Does Person."