The greater Houston radar remains a mess this evening as a slow-moving low pressure system in the upper levels of the atmosphere has continued to pull moisture inland, from the Gulf of Mexico. For now the heaviest rains have established themselves in southeastern Harris County.

Several roads in the Pasadena/La Porte/Baytown area have flooded with in excess of 4 inches of rain falling during the last three hours, and the National Weather Service has issued a flash flood warning until 9:15pm CT.

Being honest, there remains a lot of moisture in the atmosphere tonight, and I expect we’re going to continue to see at least scattered if not widespread thunderstorm development during the rest of the evening and overnight hours. However if I had to guess about tonight, I’d speculate that more of the activity will develop to the east of Interstate 45, than to the west. But confidence is low.

Regardless, tomorrow looks like another potentially very wet day for much of the metro area, and now that southeast parts of the region are getting hammered pretty much everywhere is totally waterlogged. Not a good position to be in with more rain on the way.

Posted at 7:40pm CT on Thursday by Eric Berger

Unfortunately, as expected, we’ve seen some smaller but intense rain bands move into the Houston area this afternoon. This has prompted the National Weather Service to issue two flash flood warnings for central and northern segments of Houston, effective until 7pm CT. They are shown in blue boxes below.

These storms have produced 1 to 2 inches of rainfall in the warned areas during the last hour or so, which has led to some street flooding. They are moving only slowly off to the northeast. I’d expect the threat of scattered, heavy rain showers to persist through the evening hours before (hopefully) we see a bit of a break late tonight and early Friday.

However the upper-level storm system isn’t really going anywhere, so we’ll continue to see the threat of very heavy rain on Friday, Friday night and into Saturday morning. Accordingly the National Weather Service has extended the flash flood watch for the entire metro area until 7pm CT. We’ll continue to track these storms.

Posted at 4:40pm CT on Thursday by Eric Berger

Storms this morning have generally dropped 1 to 2 inches across northern, eastern and southeastern parts of the Houston metro area. But the good news is that these storms have been fairly progressive, allowing them to move through instead of setting up shop and not really budging for hours.

In the next few hours we’re going to see deep tropical moisture moving into the upper Texas coast generally in an area between Houston and Beaumont, and on the radar you can see a long tail of moisture moving north-northeast. These areas definitely don’t need the rain, but they have not been hardest hit in recent weeks so they can probably handle an additional 2 to 4 inches as this system continues to move to the north-northeast.

Some areas of west Houston are now reporting some welcome sunshine, and I expect most of the metro area to gradually clear out over the next few hours (expect for east-northeast Houston) as the first round of storms lifts out of the region. However an unstable, moist airmass remains over much of Texas. Forecast models suggest another broad area of storms is likely to develop to the west-southwest of Houston later today, and possibly move into the metro area by late afternoon or early evening hours. My biggest concern is that these storms may move directly over the areas hardest hit by Brazos River flooding. In any case, this second system could bring locally heavy rainfall and we can’t be sure these storms will move as progressively as this morning’s rains have.

So if you’re rain free now, enjoy. Unfortunately it probably won’t last. We’ll continue updating as we know more.

Posted by Eric Berger at 10:50am CT on Thursday

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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