North Atlantic hurricanes and their atmospheric remnants are the dominant cause of extremely heavy rainfall across vast swathes of the United States — as far north as Maine, and as far inland as Illinois.

Mathew Barlow of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell compared a data set of storm tracks and size with daily observations made between 1975 and 1999 at almost 9,500 weather stations in Central and North America. Over large areas of the northeastern United States, more than two-thirds of extreme precipitation events — rainfall exceeding 100 millimetres per day — were meteorologically related to hurricane activity occurring as far away as 500 kilometres. The strength and range of the storms' effects varied according to factors such as maximum wind speed.

Geophys. Res. Lett. doi:10.1029/2010GL046258 (2011)