In a densely forested region of East Texas called the Piney Woods, rivers are still in moderate to major flood stage after recent weeks of heavy rainfall. Now, the region is preparing for what forecasters are calling a “nightmare scenario” with another round of excessive rain, which could lead to more considerable flooding on Thursday into Friday morning.
“It’s just an insane amount of rain,” said Jimmy Fowler, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Houston, “that just seems to keep falling over the same area.”
This week’s forecast calls for an additional three to five inches of rain in the same part of Texas, southeast of Dallas and northeast of Houston, where “considerable rainfall amounts have occurred this month,” forecasters said.
“Over the last 14 days, portions of eastern Texas have received five to 10 inches of rain, with localized amounts as high as 15 to 20 inches,” Marc Chenard, a senior forecaster with the Weather Prediction Center, an arm of the National Weather Service, said Tuesday afternoon. “This is 400 to 600 percent the normal rain for this two-week period.”
This week, some isolated areas could see six to 10 more inches, Mr. Chenard added. And it will fall on saturated ground. Since January, some towns, like Huntsville, Texas, have already exceeded the 51 inches of rainfall they would typically receive in an entire year.
While some of the river gauges that are in flood stage now are still short of the record-high levels seen during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the past few weeks have been a compounding onslaught of heavy rainfall, especially across the Piney Woods region, Mr. Fowler said.
Because the ground is so saturated, Mr. Fowler said, it would most likely only take a storm producing one to three inches of rain in an hour to cause flash flooding.
Wednesday is supposed to be relatively dry, but it won’t be enough time to dry out the ground before Thursday’s rain. If anything, the water that evaporates will just add to the moisture in the air, helping fuel the rainfall on Thursday.
Forecasters with the Weather Prediction Center warned that if the forecast computer weather models continued to show the “bullseye” of excessive rain lingering over the already flooded region, then they would most likely increase the probability of flash flooding to a higher level.
Confidence is high among forecasters that rain will drench the region again Thursday. However, there were a few outliers in the computer models Wednesday that showed the rain farther north, which would be good news for the waterlogged Piney Woods.
The flood concern will move east across the South as the multiple waves of storms move over Louisiana from Thursday into Friday. By the start of the weekend, East Texas may begin to dry out, but rounds of rain will pound Southern Mississippi and Alabama, which have also been stuck in a similar rainy pattern recently.
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