After emerging from Thursday’s storms mostly unscathed, Houston and Southeast Texas can look forward to much calmer weather as we go into the weekend.
TODAY
After days of “chance of thunderstorms,” we can pretty much finally take it out of the forecast. If I were a total stickler, I’d keep about a 10% chance of a shower south of I-10 and east of I-45 in, but I’m not, so we’ll call it partly to mostly sunny today after some morning low clouds or fog. Houston has yet to hit 90° this year, and today should be no exception. I expect us to max out in the mid 80s today.
High temperatures today should range from the low to mid 80s from the Brazos Valley to the Houston area to the coast. (Weather Bell).
It looks like a good evening, with the Astros back in town and the Dash in action at BBVA as well.
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.
As you may have heard from the rumbling outside your windows, the forward line of showers and thunderstorms associated with an upper-level system is now moving into the Houston area. This is not the main event, however, as stronger storms remain to the south-southwest of Houston and are steadily moving toward the metro area.
Already the National Weather Service has issued a Severe Thunderstorm Warning for parts of Colorado, Fort Bend, Jackson, and Wharton counties until 12:45pm CT. These storms are bringing heavy rain and wind gusts up to 60 mph.
Area of severe thunderstorm warning in effect until 12:45pm CT. (National Weather Service)
As we’ve been saying Houston has to get through one more bout of potentially heavy rain before seeing a reprieve from this wet pattern—and that bout is coming. In anticipation of that the National Weather Service has placed the entire region under a flash flood watch from 10am CT today through midnight.
Although conditions are dry at the surface, just above the surface moisture is starting to stream in from the Gulf of Mexico, and we’re going to see very high levels of atmospheric moisture today. At the same time a large upper-level system is moving in from the west, bringing with it the capability to lift this moisture upward. This lift will help to generate moderate, and then heavy rain later this morning and during the afternoon hours.
Here comes a final bout of rain today. (Intellicast)
