Houston survives the “Japan” storm, calmer weather ahead

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.

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.