Eric Berger

Unfortunately, as expected, the ingredients have come together this afternoon and evening to focus development of strong thunderstorms across much of the Houston metro area. As much as 3 inches of rain have fallen across southern and southwest parts of Harris County, including the NRG Stadium area, causing minor to major street flooding.

These areas are now under a flash flood warning until 8:15pm CT.

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Good morning. Unfortunately the greater Houston region remains in an unsettled pattern, and the kinds of storms we’ve seen on Thursday and Friday afternoon and evening are likely again today—and possibly in even greater abundance.

There are two factors at play with our weather today. To start with we’re going to see a mostly sunny morning. This will lead to daytime heating, which in turn will help set up a sea breeze. This flow from the Gulf of Mexico should lead to the development of coastal showers early this afternoon, and we should see them move steadily inland. At the same time a weak, late-spring cool front will be moving down though Texas, southward toward Houston, bringing some additional instability with it. The weather concern is that the sea breeze and front essentially collide, in which case we’ll have a big party in the atmosphere for instability.

This means the potential for locally heavy rain, hail and possible severe thunderstorms, like we’ve seen the last couple of afternoons. Only potentially more widespread. Here’s how one model, the HRRR, suggests conditions will look at 6pm today.

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Good afternoon. Matt’s forecast from this morning still holds up pretty well, but I wanted to provide a quick update on storm possibilities looking ahead.

FRIDAY EVENING

We’ve seen some strong thunderstorms fire up from the Lake Jackson area to Alvin this afternoon, and we’ll continue to see at least some scattered development through the evening hours as temperatures remain in the upper 80s helping to fuel these storms. Much of Houston will not see rain, but where these storms do fire up this evening they have the potential to be intense and flood streets. Small hail is also a possibility. I do not expect coverage to be quite as widespread at Thursday evening, but these things are hard to predict. Storms end by 9 or 10pm with the loss of heating.

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