UH MET FORECAST GROUP: Flooding Rains Possible Through Wednesday

A very fall like weather pattern will set up across southeast Texas this week and provide not only drought busting rains, but bring the potential for flooding through at least Wednesday. The upper level synoptic pattern will consist of a slow moving north Texas cut-off area of mid to upper level low pressure which will be moving slowly down across the state through Wednesday. Very good agreement exists among the computer models in depicting increasing diffluence aloft along with increasing lift through Monday evening. Several rounds of heavy thunderstorms look likely through mid week as vort max's rotate around the upper level low and get ejected across the region.

Flooding rains are looking more and more likely as models now forecast precip-water values to be close to topping the charts (near 2.3-2.5'') over the area which will lead to excessive rain rates under the convective activity. Of concern is the fact the models don't really show the low lifting out of the region until Friday which will allow for round after round to train over the area.

At this time the HPC (Hydrometeorological Prediction Center) has the 1-5 day precip accumulations in the 4 inch range; however our local NWS would not be surprised to see those numbers increased by another 1-3 inches by tomorrow afternoon. The reason being, the extremely high precip-water values combined with the slow movement of the low.

This will be a situation that will need to be watched closley as we head through the week and flash flood watching might be issued at some point in time this week.

12z NAM- 19z Tuesday Forecast Sounding (Showing Saturated Profile)