Dear Tom,
You recently wrote that Chicago’s heaviest official 24-hour rainfall was 9.35″ in August 1987. Didn’t Aurora get almost twice that amount?
Roger Neiman
Dear Roger,
You are correct. During a mas-sive rainstorm spanning July 17-18, 1996, the Aurora area was inundated by 16.94″ of rain in a 24-hour period, a new Illinois record. As was the case in the 1987 Chicago rainstorm, thun-derstorms kept training over the same area with repeat waves of torrential rainfall. The heaviest totals from the Aurora storm were a band of 8″-plus rains that extended in a northwest-to-south-east corridor from just south of Rockford to a little north of Kankakee. Substantial rain also fell in Chicago with Midway recording a whopping 8.08″, while O’Hare, lying north of the heaviest precipitation band, received a more modest 2.66″.
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Tom Skilling is chief meteorologist at WGN-TV. His forecasts can be seen Monday through Friday on WGN-TV News at noon and 9 p.m.
WGN-TV meteorologists Steve Kahn, Richard Koeneman and Paul Dailey plus weather producer Bill Snyder contribute to this page.
