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For years, the clearest impacts of a warming climate across the U.S. were seen in bigger and more frequent western wildfires, droughts and heatwaves in the Southwest, coastal erosion and increasingly powerful hurricanes hammering Florida’s low-lying coastline. But the monster storm generated by Hurricane Helen that dumped more than 40 trillion gallons of rain across the Southeast, killed hundreds, destroyed roads and infrastructure and left millions without power has dramatically reframed things.

The destruction caused by the worst U.S. storm since Hurricane Katrina was notable not simply for the scale but where it was concentrated: communities like Asheville and surrounding towns in North Carolina that are far inland, at a higher elevation, are more temperate and generally perceived as less prone to extreme weather events. Just as Canada’s vast and brutal wildfires demonstrated in 2023, the effects of hotter, drier weather and intense, stronger and wetter hurricanes fueled by warming oceans that take longer to dissipate over land mean that no region is safe from a changing climate.

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