Weather by the Numbers: Harvey Edition

I have just flown back to Birmingham after being deployed to South Texas to provide support for hotels we operate this week. The stories there are heartbreaking from places like Aransas Pass and especially Rockport. Talking to guests who had potentially lost everything as they awaiting the signal to return to their homes was especially difficult. Helping elderly evacuees find a place to stay as they tried to rebuild their lives was humbling. All our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of South Texas. They are a tough and resilient people.

4,323: That’s the number of days since Major Hurricane Wilma came ashore at 1030z (5:30 a.m. CDT) on October 24, 2005 near Cape Romano in Southwest Florida. More precisely, that 103,768.5 hours, 6,226,110 minutes and 373,566,600 seconds since the U.S. had seen the landfall of a major (category three or higher) hurricane. It was a drought for the record books, more than doubling the longest such period. I remember thinking exhaustedly as we came to the end of the 2005 hurricane season that more seasons like that one could seriously damage the American economy. But things have a way of evening out in nature, and we saw a record respite after a record season of destruction. Let’s hope the pendulum doesn’t swing back the other way.

40: That’s top winds in Harvey still. The center of Tropical Storm Harvey (yes it still qualifies as a tropical storm, with a well-defined center and winds of 40 mph) is not 50 miles from where it made landfall Friday night. It has been meandering around the Texas Coastal Plain southeast of San Antonio for 36 hours and is going nowhere fast. It will hang near the coast for a couple of days before drifting northward into Texas and dissipating near Dallas.

2: That is the current forward speed of the storm. Harvey has been thumbing down steering currents since he got dumped unceremoniously on the Texas Coast. But there have been no takers yet as the storm finds itself in an area of weak air currents between two high-pressure centers. It can see a trough to the northeast, but can’t quite hook up with it, sort of like a castaway watching a ship pass in the night. So it has decided to act up, creating more mischief in the form of flooding inland rains, as if the damage along the coast was not enough.

24.10: That’s the amazing amount of rain that fell in 24 hours at the National Weather Service Houston/Galveston in League City, TX. On the eastern side of the storm, powerful feeder bands set up Friday night and again Saturday night. The bands acted as giant fire hoses, transporting nearly 3-inch precipitable water on shore where a very efficient tropical rainmaking process converted nearly all of it to precipitation. The result was hourly rainfall rates between two and as much as 7 inches per hour!! Numerous flash flood emergencies were issued. The NWS warned that flooding would be worse than anything ever experienced before. I fear they were right.

420,000,000,000: That’s the number of gallons of water estimated to have fallen on Harris County so far from Harvey. That’s right, 420 BILLION with a B gallons. That is derived from the 13.55-inch average 24 hours rainfall across the county. The rainfall across the Houston area has already exceeded that of Tropical Storm Allison from 2001, which fell over five days. Harvey’s rains have fallen over two days!!

123: Adding insult to injury, Harvey has triggered numerous tornado warnings. In fact, there have been 123 tornado warnings issued by the NWS Houston since Friday morning. Harris County, where Houston is located, has been under numerous tornado warnings since Friday morning. The control tower at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston had to be evacuated for a time late this morning.

Category: ALL POSTS, Headlines