Eric Berger

Good morning. As Matt wrote last night, there’s more rain to come for Houston during the next few days, and an already waterlogged region faces still more flooding. It is not a happy situation.

As we’ve expected, upper-level low pressure is combining with a strong southwesterly flow to drive showers and thunderstorms this morning. During the pre-dawn hours this produced an additional 1 inch of rain along Spring Creek, generally in northern Harris and southern Montgomery counties, which had already received as much as 6 inches on Wednesday evening. Both Spring Creek and Cypress Creek, in the area, are near bankfull. The West Fork of the San Jacinto River has returned to major flood levels. And southwest of Houston, of course, the Brazos River remains at historically high flood levels (it crested at 54.78 feet last night).

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Storms are firing up along a boundary just to the north of Houston this evening, especially over areas from The Woodlands to Conroe. The National Weather Service has issued a flash flood warning for this part of the region until 6:45pm CT. This means flooding may quickly develop as rains continue.

It appears as though these storms will continue to develop over primarily the northern Houston metro area this evening, north of Interstate 10, before tapering off tonight.

However it seems likely that another, more organized system will move into the Houston region from the west on Thursday morning, bringing considerable rainfall, certainly at least a few inches and more in isolated areas. Although this is far from a certainty, we are going to have to watch closely for more flooding tomorrow.

Posted at 5:20pm CT on Wednesday by Eric Berger

Houston recorded a staggering 24.84 inches of rain in March, April and May at Bush Intercontinental Airport. That three month total for spring ranks second for this period in the city’s history all time—behind only last year with its 26.61 inches.

Clearly this has caused widespread flooding problems, particularly north of Harris County, along Spring and Cypress creeks, as well as to the west, along the entire Brazos River watershed, which is presently experiencing historic flooding. And the misery is not over, with more heavy rain likely from Thursday through Saturday or Sunday.

But the clouds have had one silver lining—temperatures. May ended with an average temperature of 74.5 degrees, which is 2.4 degrees below normal. That’s not among the 10 coldest Mays on record for the city, and we weren’t going to reach that list because the month had only one real cool front, back during the first week when temperatures fell into the 50s for a few nights. Instead we mostly had cooler days because of the clouds and the rains. The average high was 83.1 degrees, and amazingly we still haven’t had a 90-degree day in 2016.

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