cieldumort
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Loc: Austin, Tx
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Re: Tropical Storm Barry forms in Gulf of Mexico
Thu Jul 11 2019 04:42 PM
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Rare Day 3 HIGH RISK has been issued by WPC. Significant, life-threatening flooding is likely, and extreme, record-setting flooding is possible. The only other Day-3 High Risks WPC has issued were for Harvey (2017) and Florence (2018).
Quote:
Excessive Rainfall Discussion NWS Weather Prediction Center College Park MD 427 PM EDT Thu Jul 11 2019 Day 3 Valid 12Z Sat Jul 13 2019 - 12Z Sun Jul 14 2019
...THERE IS A HIGH RISK OF EXCESSIVE RAINFALL SATURDAY AND SATURDAY NIGHT OVER EASTERN LOUISIANA AND FAR SOUTHWEST MISSISSIPPI. THIS INCLUDES NEW ORLEANS AND BATON ROUGE...
...Central Gulf Coast and Lower Mississippi Valley... Scenarios involving Barry become especially concerning on Saturday and Saturday night. Significant flooding and life-threatening flash flooding are likely across eastern Louisiana and southwest Mississippi. The official NHC track, supported especially by recent ECMWF and NAM runs, will bring a hurricane or strong tropical storm slowly inland, producing widespread heavy tropical rainfall. The worst case scenario, then, which is depicted in multiple ECMWF and NAM runs, would be for a persistent band or bands of convective rainfall to form and then train from south-southwest to north-northeast within a broadly convergent inflow region off the Gulf. With a slow cyclone track and broadly available moist and unstable airmass to the south, there is potential several hours training convection, producing high-end rainfall amounts. The 12Z NAM CONUS Nest, for instance, only runs out to 00Z Sunday, but produces over 10 inches of rain in some places over just a 6 hour period ending at 00Z. The NAM and CONUS Nest may be a bit fast. We would expect the threat to worsen during the overnight hours leading into Sunday morning. But what is concerning is that when removing placement differences, and just viewing the intensity of the storm total rainfall, we are seeing broad swaths of 20-plus inches of rain in the ECMWF, NAM, Canadian, and GFS. The 06Z NAM even produced a 30 inch maximum in southwest Louisiana. If this banded scenario sets up, it easily could shift somewhat to the east or west. But based on our best available information at this time, we are depicting the maximum west of New Orleans and east of Lake Charles, placing Lafayette and Baton Rouge in the area of greatest threat. In crafting the associated QPF, we also expected that the heaviest amounts may tend to prefer areas near and south of Interstate 10 to find the unstable airmass.
This scenario is not quite as certain as other storms of recent memory like Florence last year. Barry has not yet become very well organized. But we have seen in numerous examples, including the unnamed system that struck Louisiana in August 2016, that when the global models unanimously begin depicting these high-end rainfall amounts they are usually correct in forecasting a strongly anomalous event with potential to produce substantial impacts. For now we have trended the WPC QPF up to indicate areal average 10 to 20 inch amounts, with isolated 25 inch amounts, and with much of the bulk of this occurring on Day 3.
Related Flhurricane links:
Unnamed Louisiana Low of 2016
Florence Lounge (2008)
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