After heavy rains Saturday, and almost nothing Sunday, what can be expected for today? Let’s discuss that in a moment, but first lets look at our cooler-than-normal May.
Every year we generally get warm, dry Mays or, if the storm pattern is more active, cooler and wetter Mays. This month has obviously been the latter. So far this May has been nearly 3° cooler than normal. Moreover, consider these high temperatures over the last eight days: 80,73,83,81,70,80,82 and 85 degrees. Normally at this time of year we should be edging into summer.
A graphical representation shows warm/dry May vs. wetter/cooler May dichotomy nicely:
Average temperature in Houston from May 1 through May 22. (Brian Brettschneider)
On Saturday we all found out the high pressure ridging that was supposed to shield our area of from widespread showers and thunderstorms this weekend did not, in fact, extend all that far into eastern Texas. Today there is no such mystery. The high pressure and drier air is far to the north of our region.
This water vapor image shows reddish, drier air well to the north of Houston. We’re on the wet side. (NOAA)
Good morning. And for those of us who live in the Clear Lake area, it was an early morning as thunder rumbled through at about 5am. I will confess that I did not expect this. So what’s going on, and what does it mean for the forecast?
There are a couple of things at play here. First of all, the high pressure ridging that was supposed to keep us drier for most of the weekend and to start next week isn’t quite as pronounced, nor does it extend as far south into Texas as previously thought. We can see the effect of this by looking at a NAM model forecast of precipitable water for Texas at 5am CT Saturday morning.
NAM model forecast of precipitable water for Saturday morning at 5am CT. (Weather Bell)
As a line of strong storms moved through Houston this afternoon Matt Lanza snapped the following radar image and then, somehow the twisted tendrils of his mind thought of … Japan. And thus we had this image.
When they reached the coast this afternoon they looked like … Japan. (Matt Lanza)
Anyway, the storms made nice eastward progress through the area at about 20mph, or a little faster. It’s a good thing they did because some locations (such as Ellington Field near Clear Lake) reported as much as 1 inch of rain in 15 minutes. Overall the storm movement generally limited accumulations from 0.5 to 3 inches of rain in total. There were also scattered reports of damaging winds and trees down in some areas of Brazoria and Galveston counties, as well as a tornado warning for the coast (since expired).
But now the storms are moving swiftly to the east and the heavy rain should be completely gone from the metro area by 5pm (it is already gone from central Houston). We may see some additional light to moderate rain this evening, but everything should end during the overnight hours. And then the rain, any organized storms, are gone for several days at least—well into next week.
We’re also going to see a brief bit of cooling and my advice is to enjoy Friday morning. Low temperatures could fall into the mid- to upper-60s north of Houston, and even areas closer to the coast may fall to 70 degrees. Enjoy, because we’re going to see lot sunshine and humidity by the weekend and next week. The sunshine is fine, but it means we’re going to be in the 90s soon, with muggy mornings in the 70s.
