Potential For Heavy Rain Over The Next 24 Hours
With the chance of some heavy rain in our area and a flood watch, I wanted to get you a blog tonight about potential rainfall totals. It looks like the wet 2011 is going to extend at least in the first couple of seasons of 2012. Let's start with our latest watch.
Flood Risk Over The Next 24 Hours
We have actually started this very close to normal in the rain gauge, but that is about to change. It does look like some heavy rain will fall over the next 24 hours so the NWS has issued a Flood Watch for the eastern half of the area through tomorrow. The watch does include the Louisville area.
Right now, we have a lot of rain to our southwest with much of that potentially surging our way in the next 24 hours.
Let's dive into some of the data. We will see a nice surge of warmer air over the next 24 hours. That should shut down any of the light sleet we saw today, but that surge will help produce quite a bit of rain for parts of our area. The NAM, GFS, and HPC all are putting out robust numbers. Let me show you some of the totals.
GFS Rainfall Totals Through Late Tomorrow
Notice the GFS is spitting out 1" to 1.5" for most of our area through late tomorrow. The GFS does sprinkle in some rainfall totals near 1.75".
NAM Rainfall Totals Through Late Tomorrow
While the NAM shows some more small scale detail to the precip, it also shows about 1" to 1.5" of rain for most of our area with totals up to around 1.75". This is good continuity among the models.
HPC Rainfall Totals Through Late Tomorrow
HPC is throwing down the gauntlet showing 1.75" to 2" for most of our area! Notice some values near 2.25" east of I-65 and south of the Ohio River!
My Thoughts On Rainfall Totals
The Flood Watch appears wise from the NWS. It looks like the rain will come over a long enough timeframe that "flash flooding" doesn't appear to be a major problem, but river flooding could occur. The GFS and NAM show great continuity on this forecast and have been very consistent over the last few runs. I like 1.5" for much of area through tomorrow, with some isolated totals near 2". It really looks like a soggy couple of days so keep the umbrella handy.
In Case You Missed The Aurora Display Check This Out!
Northern light at a local ski house in Tromsø from Per Ivar Somby on Vimeo.
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