A woman in Asheville, North Carolina, fled her home when floodwaters arrived at her door. Soon, her world was upended. Her apartment, she later learned, had been washed away by Hurricane Helene.
There are invisible rivers in the sky — enormous plumes of moisture borne over oceans that, when released back to Earth, can bring a drizzle or deluge.
Months later, in West Virginia, another woman watched one of those deluges arrive. “This one, it wasn’t normal,” Carol Lester recalled. “The water came down so fast, and then it rose so fast. … There was water coming from places I’ve never seen water come from.”
These are scenes from The Washington Post’s investigation into the global rise of dangerous rainfall. Backed by tremendous amounts of data, compelling storytelling and innovative data visualizations, the series won the Poynter Journalism Prize for Excellence in Climate Change Reporting earlier this year.
In their citation, judges said the Post developed creative new tools to analyze where atmospheric moisture is intensifying and map where inland flooding risk is rising. “Reporters then projected that risk on infrastructure from India to Appalachia,” they wrote. “They told compelling stories of people whose communities weren’t prepared, and delivered a tangible warning: Communities must reassess their flood risk and improve their alert systems. Through innovative graphics and effective storytelling, the Post’s series stands out for offering a valuable tool, and telling an important tale about the human cost of inaction as the climate warms.”
Sponsored by the Hennecke Family Foundation, the Poynter Journalism Prize for Excellence in Climate Change Reporting recognizes rigorous and illuminating journalism that uses high-quality, scientifically based work to enlighten, educate and inform the public about climate change and related issues. This is the prize’s inaugural year.
Kevin Crowe, a data journalist at the Post who contributed to the series, said the project’s goal was to make the science understandable. The stories are grounded in data, he said, but ultimately speak to the dangers for people on the ground.
A Welch, West Virginia, resident shovels mud from the damaged basement of a downtown apartment building. The Washington Post documented the human consequences of dangerous rainfall and rising flood risks in its “Floods Above” series. (Tom Brenner/For The Washington Post)
“What we want to do is make it all less abstract,” Crowe said. “Talking to somebody at the bus stop about atmospheric moisture is — I don’t know how far you get — but once you really explain what that does and how now there’s flooding on the street in front of us, that’s a different level that people can take home. People can understand that.”
Crowe added that he and his colleagues worked hard to explain the phenomenon. Surfacing people’s stories, he thought, was key. The series features people in West Virginia, North Carolina, India and elsewhere.
The seed of the series was planted more than a year ago.
Before joining the Post in 2024, Ben Noll worked for the New Zealand government for nearly a decade. The island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean is particularly exposed to extreme rainfall and flooding, so the meteorologist grew interested in a pattern he was seeing in the atmosphere: increasing moisture.
“We often hear about, in the news and online, about global warming, but at the same time there is this other phenomenon that’s occurring — like a cousin phenomenon — that’s global moistening,” Noll said. “So the two are interconnected, but I think the warming has gotten a lot more attention than the moistening.”
Noll began investigating the phenomenon on his own. He saw that, month after month, the moisture in the atmosphere was setting records. “Alongside those records, we saw lots of flooding events and heavy rainfall coinciding with the higher moisture in the atmosphere,” he said.
When Noll began working for the Post in 2024, he brought the work with him. At a team-building event in November, he pitched an idea for a series on what he’d been tracking for more than a year.
“He had been analyzing atmospheric moisture content, which is kind of like a wild basis for a series of stories if you’re not super attuned to these kinds of things,” Crowe said. “I hadn’t done an analysis of atmospheric vapor — water vapor in the air — before.”
Noll thought it’d be an interesting and novel approach to looking at climate change — “a different angle to that,” he said, “and how it’s affecting people and lives and livelihoods.”
Interest was piqued. The team met at a coffee shop. Ideas began to flow. A whole team assembled.
“There’s a lot of different expertise on the team — from reporters to people who are talented in data visualization, and then some of the meteorology that I was then providing to the team,” Noll said. “All that combined expertise led us on this journey to producing ‘Floods Above.’”
Children play in a pool on Summers Street in Welch, West Virginia. The Washington Post’s “Floods Above” series used data and on-the-ground reporting to show how rising flood risks are affecting communities in Appalachia and around the world. (Tom Brenner/For The Washington Post)
John Muyskens, the primary graphics reporter for portions of the series’ piece about Appalachia, said Noll was the mastermind behind the data analysis. Muyskens, whose work focuses on climate change and extreme weather, said he and Niko Kommenda worked with Noll to visualize his findings. Kommenda led the graphics work on the series’ “Deadly Rivers in the Sky,” according to several Post colleagues. He was among more than 300 Post staffers who were laid off earlier this year.
“I think the visualizations, particularly here, they help us,” Muyskens said. “They help the reader see something that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to see, because these rivers are something much more abstract than the river you can see and touch. It helps you visualize the otherwise invisible, or to comprehend something on a scale that is just too hard to see. Particularly with these globes … only astronauts are seeing this perspective.”
Naema Ahmed, a graphics reporter on the Washington Post’s climate and environment team who contributed to the series, said she and her colleagues often get piles of data to sift through, but they can only show so much.
“But really, I think the same concept can apply to text. Saying everything isn’t necessarily as effective as making the main points, which you can apply to a visual as well,” Ahmed said. “So showing only the things that are driving the point home, kind of that editing approach to both text, visuals and paring down what you want to say about a really complicated data set.”
Crowe said he was honored to have won the Poynter Journalism Prize for Excellence in Climate Change Reporting. “My entire journalism career, Poynter is like the beacon on the hill,” he said. “It’s an absolute honor to have been named a prize winner. Incredible. So, so cool.”
Ahmed said the series brings together two approaches: telling the stories of people affected by extreme rainfall and using data to show the scale of the problem — and that it could affect anyone.
“So we’re kind of, I think, hoping to marry the two. Because I think even the people that this happens to, they themselves don’t necessarily expect that they will be in the situation,” Ahmed said. “I would love for everyone to come away with, ‘This is also a problem for me, even if I’m not right now facing this type of weather.’”
Washington Post climate reporter Sarah Kaplan, one of the lead reporters on “Floods Above,” will join Poynter Oct. 8 for a free Beat Academy webinar on covering rising flood risks. The 75-minute session will explore how journalists can find reliable local data, identify vulnerable communities and develop stories before severe weather strikes. Register here.