The rain will continue through Thursday as this storm sits on the coast of TX and slowly drifts to the SW then finally to the NE as it starts to dissipate later this week.
Here is the current radar of the storm...
Notice the bands of moisture coming in off the ocean. Bands like these have caused the extremely high rainfall numbers we are seeing. These bands are due to a fetch of moisture the storm allows to come in off the Gulf. The image below shows how the storm circulation causes this moisture fetch as seen by the blue bands...
By tomorrow morning the storm has not moved much...
By Wednesday morning it has start to drift northeast...
Notice rain bands continue to come in off the ocean for both days!
Finally by Thursday it starts to wind down..
All we can do now is wait and hope the rescue effort executes well down there. This is history in the making.
So why is this happening? It has nothing to do with this storm being stronger than others from an historical perspective but rather the speed of this storm. The storm is sandwiched between two high pressure systems as I drew below....
The result is a storm that lingers near a warm moist Gulf of Mexico. Again its not that anything on its own is out of the ordinary this is just a case of a a perfect alignment of individual factors to cause this destruction of rainfall.
Lets hope the folks the best down in this region.
PS...
We have another tropical system to watch that will skirt by the Carolina's this week. This will not be a hurricane but rather a combo of a tropical system/Nor'easter....
More later.
Hey Willy, I haven't stopped by much lately, but now it looks like some interesting weather is happening once again. Too bad that the Harvey situation is also such a terrible disaster. Harvey was such a sneaky storm . . . if I recall, it was one of those African tropical waves that developed into a low-level tropical storm with an innocent looking track thru the southern Caribbean, doing nothing worse than giving the Aruba vacationers a rainy day. It then fell apart and its remains were supposed to ground themselves and disappear over central Mexico. I was satisfied that the tropics were calm, and paid attention to the eclipse instead. Then a few days later you heard that Harvey took a turn north and was re-forming into a Category 3 (and then 4) monster! A good reminder that the weather is a powerful and still not-fully-understood force that our wonderful models have still not tamed.
ReplyDeleteAnd as to the nor'easter storm developing east of the Georgia coast (PTC10) -- looks like that one is going to rough-up the Outer Banks and then turn into tropical storm, but out to sea, s/w of the 40-70, at worst it gives us a few showers on Wednesday early AM. There's a trough coming east that should escort this one away from us here in NJ. But after watching Harvey, I need to say "I hope!!" And then, in a few more months, we're gonna be watching storms like this one wondering if it's the next blizzard.
And one other footnote -- I've been hearing lately that ENSO has gone totally neutral, no La Nina follow-up to last year's El Nino. But for the last few days, the sea temp anomaly map is starting to look pretty cold in the eastern Pacific (region 3) near the equator. Is there gonna be a La Nina after all? Which would correlate with a fairly active Atlantic tropical storm season in Sept and October, IIRC. But still too early to think about the winter season . . . right? Jim G
Hey Jim, thanks for checking in. That warm Gulf water, lack of sheer and two high pressure systems sandwiching Harvye really is a recipe for disaster. Also now looks like this tropical system off the east coast will inch north enough to give us rain today (there go my golf plans). The storm center stays well offshore tho from our area. I am starting to look at this winter. That ENSO really bares watching...I am thinking we flirt with a weak la nina. There are some cold subsurface temps that have started to emerge in that region. I am also watching the NE Pacific. I really do not want to see that cold pool inch too far to the west coast. If that coupled with a weak la nina emerges we can be looking at a similar situation to last year. Too early to tell tho. I will have outlook out in mid oct.
DeleteHarvey*
Delete