Hurricane Harvey
Just a few days after Hurricane Harvey made landfall in southeast Texas, Harvey has downgraded to a Tropical Storm, however it is still bringing torrential rainfall and massive flooding to southeast Texas and Louisiana. To recap, Hurricane Harvey made late-night landfall on 25 August 2017 as a Category 4 Hurricane.
Some of the latest precipitation totals are as high as 40+ inches as of late Monday evening, 28 August 2017. Flooding is widespread and power outages have affected many cities along the Gulf Coast, especially in Houston, Texas. Below is an example of the number of river gauges observing major flooding along the Gulf Coast via the National Weather Service – Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service website. The red and purple dots represent river gauges that are experiencing moderate to major flooding in and around the Houston, TX area.
If we look a little bit closer, at one of the purple gauges that represent major flooding, below is an image of the West Fork San Jacinto River Gauge near Conroe, TX, where the gauge is experiencing record flooding so far, peaking at a flood stage of 127.3 feet!
More precipitation and flooding are expected throughout the week, where recovery efforts will last for the next few months. Below is an image of the Imagery Band 5 (11.45um), an infrared band on the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument on-board the Suomi-National Polar Orbiting Partnership satellite, showing the relative location of the storm along the Gulf Coast at 0816Z, 28 August 2017. The brightness temperature values are expressed from a range of colors; 180K (brighter colors representing temperatures of cold clouds/convective cloud tops) to 320K (darker colors, land and ocean temperatures). The spatial resolution of the imaging band is at 375 meters.
