The National Weather Service and other weather experts have recently released final data on the strength, speed and destructiveness of Helene.
The Orlando sentinel has also released some shocking statistics about Helene's destructive path.
Hurricane Helene moves across the Gulf of Mexico, expanding to a whopping width of 1,110km and moving at high speeds. Both factors are deadly.
In Florida's Big Bend area - where the storm made landfall, through Tallahassee - there were 5 deaths from direct impact and 2 deaths from indirect impact of Helene.
The powerful waves inundated the most severely affected area of Helene - the Apalachee Bay area - pushing more than 4.5 feet of water into areas that are often dry.
350mm of rain fell on Sumatra, just north of Apalachicola Bay - an area on the weaker left edge of the storm.
Hurricane Helene moved so fast that it created a large area of wind damage that crossed the mainland, killing large trees and causing widespread power outages.
The Suwannee Valley, north of Gainesville, Florida, saw winds of 120 to 160 km/h and maximum sustained winds of 160 km/h measured further north, in Alma, Georgia, 215 km from the landfall site.
Hurricane Helene caused major flooding in the southern Appalachian region. The highest total rainfall was 762mm in Busick, North Carolina, on the Blue Ridge Parkway northeast of Asheville.
To put it into perspective, Fort Lauderdale experienced 610mm of rain in April 2023, trapping cars and forcing people to wade through water up to their belts. But Fort Lauderdale is flat.
Busick is 890m tall. Nearby is Mitchell Mountain, which is 2,037m low. Asheville is downstream at an altitude of 650m. All the rainwater will flow into low-lying areas and valleys. From there, the water overflowed into steep areas, wiping out villages on the way, flooding Asheville.
The National Water Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that the rainfall across the Appalachian region will make Helene a once-in-a-lifetime 1,000-year storm.
Meteorologist Ben Noll said that the humidity flow of Helene "is the strongest humidity flow ever recorded in some areas of the six states: Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia".
He measured the storm's IVT, which is the amount of water vapor that moves through a given square meter in a second. The results showed that Helene's IVT was "about 1.5 times higher than any previous system in the region since 1940".
According to AccuWeather, Hurricane Helene dumped a whopping 42 trillion gallons of rain in the southeastern United States. That's enough water to fill Tahoe Lake at one time, enough to fill 51,000 Dallas Cowboys stadiums, and enough to flow through Niagara waterfall for nearly two years.
A preliminary estimate from Moody's Analytics shows that Helene caused $34 billion in damage to the southeastern United States. Other estimates are much higher.
According to Orlando sentinel's hurricane report, experts believe climate change is making storms like Helene more intense, faster and bring more moisture.
