How Many Gallons Of Rain Fell?

Imagine laying down a tarp over Duval county to collect every drop of rain that fell this afternoon. How many one gallon buckets of water would the storms fill?

Let's figure it out. One inch of rain over a square acre will fill up 25,154 gallon buckets. Or if the inch of rain fell over 1 square mile it would fill 17,380,000 gallons.

Jacksonville is 757 square miles or 484,480 acres big. By multiplying 17.38 million gallons of rain by 757 miles equals 13,156,660,000 gallons of water over Jacksonville for each inch of rain.

This image shows radar estimates for rainfall over the past 3 days.  Duval has orange and red colors showing rain of 5 to 9 inches.  So based on an average of 7.5 inches of rain, the total amount of rain that fell over the past 3 days in Duval equals 98,674,950,000 gallons of water.
Not all the rain soaks into the ground. Runoff from impervious surfaces like roads, parking lots, and thick clay soil reduces the amount of rain that sinks down to the aquifer.  Our flood warnings represent areas where the ground is not absorbing the rain.