The Pacific Ocean gifted us with a whale of a storm that will make this week a mess for just about everybody. The approaching disturbance will trigger dangerous thunderstorms in the south, another blizzard in Colorado, flooding rains, and usher forth an abrupt end to the unusually warm air that’s bathed us for so long.
Last week, Austin, Texas, and surrounding communities found themselves flooded after a relentless thunderstorm dropped more than a foot of rain in just a few hours. This astounding rainfall event was the result of a phenomenon known as “training,” and as Austin saw, training can lead to devastating results.
Gone are the days of temperatures in the 90s as the southern U.S. finally joins the rest of the country in the damp, dreary experience that is the arrival of fall. A ribbon of moisture direct from the tropical Pacific Ocean will team up with an approaching low to dump loads of heavy, much-needed rain on the south in the coming days.
For the second time in as many months, we’re dealing with “twin typhoons” out in the western Pacific Ocean, and the stronger of the two is on a collision course with the Philippines. The typhoon is moving slowly, and the models don’t paint a pretty picture for the northern half of the country as it passes through over the next couple of days.
When it became clear last week that the looming weather catastrophe wouldn’t be remembered for Hurricane Joaquin, but rather the historic flooding in the Carolinas, I knew that the internet would be plastered with videos of idiots driving through floods come Monday. Idiots came through. Don’t drive through a flood, you idiots.
Good news! We’re pretty sure that Hurricane Joaquin is going to head out to sea, with the chance of landfall on the United States fairly low at this point. The bad news is that there will still be more than a foot of rain in parts of the Carolinas, and stiff onshore winds and high waves will create coastal flooding in the Mid-Atlantic much like a storm surge would.
While we’ve stressed over the eventual track of powerful Hurricane Joaquin over the next few days, a concerning number of people may not be aware that a significant—potentially devastating—flash flood event will take place with or without the hurricane coming close to land. Many spots could see more than a foot of rain this weekend.
A complicated weather pattern will likely dump tons of rain on the East Coast later this week and this weekend. A wide range of possibilities could unfold—stretching from scattered showers to the unlikely event of a hurricane threatening land—so just about everyone who lives east of the Appalachian Mountains needs to watch the forecast closely.
Today is the halfway point in July; we’re firmly in summer’s grip with just as much of the season behind us as we’ve got in front of us. It’s a lonely, miserable time of the year for us heat haters, but for folks in the southwestern United States, it marks the glorious time of year when monsoon season ramps up.
Away we go into the last weekend of June, and the month will draw to a close just as it (and we) began life: wet and angry. In fact, we’re closing the month with a storm system that’s more common in fall than the middle of summer. Heavy rain will soon overspread much of the eastern United States this weekend, accompanied by some severe thunderstorms on the southern end of the system.
Three days after landfall and after traveling over more than 850 miles of land, Bill is still a tropical depression as it swirls over Missouri. The storm has produced catastrophic flooding along its path, and more flooding is likely through the Ohio Valley and eventually into the I-95 corridor of the Mid-Atlantic.
As Tropical Depression Bill swirls its way through northern Texas this afternoon, the storm looks more impressive over land than it ever did over the ocean. The storm is still producing very heavy rainfall, and flash flooding is likely as it continues sloshing towards Oklahoma and eventually the Midwest.
A major flash flood event could unfold over the next couple of days as what is likely to become Tropical Storm Bill limps its way towards Texas. What the storm lacks in vivacity it will more than make up for in intense rainfall. The storm will produce flooding rains from Houston to New York City, causing major flash flooding in areas that already have more water than they can handle.
Hurricane Blanca is only the second named storm in the three-week-old Pacific Hurricane Season, but it’s already the second category four hurricane to form there in the past two days. The storm will slowly move towards the Baja Peninsula this weekend, after which it might or might not drench the American Southwest.
The recent rains over the southern Plains have been nothing less than spectacular, spawning a constant stream of severe thunderstorms that dumped inches of rain in short time, flooding areas that haven’t seen this much in years. The influx of water finally paid off: only a few small parts of Texas and Oklahoma are still in drought.
It’s been a crazy month for severe weather on the southern Plains, with Texas and Oklahoma making a spectacular recovery from drought by drowning under more rain than they’ve seen in years. Leaving behind hundreds of victims and millions (if not billions) of dollars in damage, the rain will finally start to subside this week.
It just keeps getting worse. The gully-washers and toad-stranglers are in full force across Texas and Oklahoma at this hour as the region stares down the barrel of more heavy rain and flooding after years of thirsting for some delicious sky water. Some spots could see double-digit rainfall totals by this time next week.
Flooding rains, heavy snow, and dangerous ice are roaring groundward across the middle of the country this afternoon as a juicy series of slow-moving fronts slowly makes its way towards the coast. The disruptive storm could even push Boston to 108 inches of snow, making this the snowiest season ever recorded in the city.
The West Coast is famous for its "feast or famine" approach to the weather, and true to form, people from southern California through British Columbia are getting clobbered by an immense storm. The storm is causing so many issues that it's tough to list them all. Welcome back to the world of weather, West Coasters.
