Southern Louisiana was hit hard by relentless rains a few weeks ago. Some locations received a ridiculous soaking: two feet of rain within three days. More than a dozen lives were lost in the resulting flooding, and tens of thousands of homes were inundated.

The culprit was a low pressure system that was strong enough to have become a Tropical Depression if it had moved out into the Gulf of Mexico. It slowly crawled across the Gulf Coast instead, wringing out an incredible amount of moisture from air pulled in from over the Gulf—about triple the total volume dumped by Hurricane Katrina.

Our warming climate is predicted to intensify storms. But what can we say about how climate change may have affected this particular deluge?