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Norman KNOWS |
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Gene Norman
Get to know Gene
August 2009
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Weather More KHOU Blogs
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Thanks to a stationary front draped across Southeast Texas, the skies erupted today, just in time for the evening rush hour. And yes, the sporadic rains we've seen over the past week have helped our drought - a bit. This is what HD Doppler looked like just before 4 pm as a line of storms broke out from Chambers County, through downtown and off to the west toward Katy. Notice the tremendous number of lightning strikes at that time.
Here's a close up view of the storms over downtown Houston. As you can see, nearly half the lightning was with the storms that poured rain from the west side of town over toward the Medical Center.
Then the line collided with storms in Chambers County and headed toward Galveston Island. Our Weather Bug sensor at Moody Gardens reported a 54 mph wind gust as the storms roared through.
Where it did rain, it poured with over two inches in the bucket at our Weather Bug sensor at Hermann Park. Galveston also picked up over an inch for the second time this week.
We're seen rain in different parts of Southeast Texas since last weekend, when the first of two rare mid-July cool fronts approached the area. Of course we wouldn't expect a front to actually make it here and cool us off, but these fronts served a greater purpose in that they increased our rain chances. The front acts as a focusing mechanism allowing moisture to gather, rise quickly and produce towering clouds that pour down rain. We had a front last weekend, another approached Wednesday and the long-range models I look at indicate a third front could arrive by late Monday of next week. Here's a look at last week's drought monitor, which comes out every Thursday. The deep red is the exceptional drought classification - the highest level of drought. Matagorda, Brazoria and Fort Bend Counties were in that classification.
Now compare that to this week - a slight improvement:
Several counties have been downgraded to severe from exceptional and some to moderate from severe. It's a far cry from what we need, but to get it, we might have to have a tropical storm and no one wants that. TrackBackTrackBack URL for this entry: 0 TrackBacksListed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: More Welcome Rain. TrackBack URL for this entry: http://dev.beloblog.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/135951 4 CommentsLeave a comment |
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the norman number sucks
Please e-mail me at teresafoster@austin.rr.com if it appears that Hurricane Ana could be headed in the direction of Brazoria County, Texas. My elderly 83- year old Mother (who is in poor health) lives in Lake Jackson, TX. Does Hurricane Ana appear that it could be a strong hurricane? Any information you could provide on if the direction of Hurricane Ana could be towards Brazoria County would be greatly appreciated by me and my mother so I could have time to make some arrangements to get her home secured and her evacuated by someone in a timely manner. I live in Austin, TX --- so I need to try to make plans in advance. You could also e-mail my Mother at bbb74ac@yahoo.com. Her ph: 979-299-0086 (h) or 979-415-5022 (m). My ph: 512-372-8855 (h) or 512-820-0040 (m)
I can begin to see why NASA gave up Gene so easily, last year when IKE was threatning us the stations had to pull Doc in out of re-tirement to handle it, and now with hurricane Bill which wasn't supposed to come inland at all, and was supposed to go out to sea off the east coast. give Doc another call maybe he can get things right.
I would like to offer a suggestion...Mr Norman needs to be more sensitive to those of us suffering from the drought.
He comes across as someone who is totally oblivious and unconcerned about those of us who have trees, ponds, pastures and animals dying because of the drought. For the last week, I've listened to his weather segment twice, and both times he "complains" about all the rain that those poor folks living on concrete are getting. For those of you whose yards aren't so pretty, I'm sorry. But that doesn't compare to life and death on country ranches. I live in Riverside, just outside Huntsville...last night we got 0.2 inches of rain, and that is the total since first of July. I have trees dying, pasture is burned up and crunchy, stock pond is down 4 feet, nothing for any of the livestock to eat, and we can't even find hay to buy.
So please. Quit whining about too much rain for those of you who don't really need it.
Regards,
Linda Stettbacher
PS If I could forward this to channel 2 I would...their weather guy seems to get it.