When will rain from Hurricane Ian reach Columbia and the Midlands? Here’s the latest forecast
Rain from Hurricane Ian should start falling over Columbia and the Midlands tonight and then pick up early Friday morning, forecasters say.
“We’ll start seeing rain coming to the area tonight … it’ll be more substantial after midnight,” Chris Rohrbach, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in West Columbia, said around 4:45 p.m. on Thursday. “It’ll be moderate rain at times.”
Ian became a hurricane again around 5 p.m. Thursday evening after being downgraded to a tropical storm early Thursday morning, according to the National Hurricane Center. The storm is expected to make landfall in South Carolina around Charleston.
The NWS predicts severe weather from the storm as it passes across the Midlands on Friday and Saturday, including strong winds of as as much as 50 to 60 mph and flooding.
The Columbia area could get between 2 to 6 inches of rain over the entire event.
Rohrbach said the heaviest rainfall for the area would be on Friday.
“You’ll see the heaviest downpour start after daybreak on Friday,” he said. “It will come in waves, on and off at times.”
Rohrbach noted that the rain would start tapering off on Saturday.
This will be the first named storm to hit the Columbia area since the remnants of Tropical Storm Fred washed through in August 2021, the NWS says. It’s also the fourth Atlantic hurricane of the season, and the first to make landfall in the continental U.S.
This story was originally published September 29, 2022 at 5:27 PM.
