Southeast Texas rain will end this morning

Good morning, and I hope we all managed okay overnight. The worst of the rain is long past, though we will still have rain chances for a few more hours this morning. Then, we are just setup for a chilly weekend. Let’s walk through things here.

This morning

Radar as of 6:20 this morning shows sporadic showers across the region, with heavier rain marching east into Louisiana. We have one additional batch of heavy rain that stretches from near Victoria southwest to Beeville down in South Texas.

This batch of showers will push through the southeast half of the Houston area over the next 2-3 hours. Once that clears, steady rain should end. I can’t rule out lingering light rain or drizzle the rest of today. But the risk for moderate to heavy rain ends with this last batch pushing through.

Travel

As of 6:45 this morning, there were just shy of 20 high water locations on area roadways indicated by Houston TranStar

The high water locations are pretty evenly dispersed across the region. If you’re out and about early this morning, just keep that in mind and drive carefully. Never go around barricades.

Flooding

Overnight, we saw Keegans Bayou, Halls Bayou, Greens Bayou, Armand Bayou, Little Cypress Creek, and South Mayde Creek come out of their banks. As of 6 AM, several were still out of banks or at bankfull and slowly receding. Cypress Creek, Spring Creek, and Cedar Bayou are all rising but expected to stay within their banks.

The exception to this will be the West Fork of the San Jacinto River.

Because of heavy upstream rains and heavy rains in the area, all that runoff is filtering into the San Jacinto River, and it is expected to crest sometime by Monday or Tuesday in major flood stage at Humble. With the forecast of a 53.9 foot crest, major lowland flooding is expected with several subdivisions impacted. You can see the expected impacts at each level on the NWS website for this particular gage. For reference, this particular location crested just shy of 51.7 feet back in March. So this will be a bit higher.

Rain Totals

Houston officially had 4.31″ of rain on Friday, making December 7, 2018 the 5th wettest December day on record in the city, going back to the late 1800s. It was also our wettest single day since August of 2017, which we all know was during Hurricane Harvey.

Per the Harris County Flood Control website, most of the Houston area received essentially what was forecast. Most places saw 3-5″ of rain, with a few spots seeing more.

With rain totals like this, it’s never how much falls, it’s how much of it falls quickly that really matters and is always the challenge for us in forecasting. Hopefully we made that clear in the runup to this storm. Fortunately, we’ve now got a few days to dry out, with our next rain chance not in the forecast until at least Wednesday night or Thursday.