Rains continue, but we are lowering Houston’s flood threat to Stage 1

Good afternoon. The atmosphere has behaved itself so far today, with most of the area seeing one-half inch of rainfall, or less, since sunrise. We expect this trend to continue today and tonight. Yes, rain will be possible. No, it should not be extreme.

Overall, we think the threat of a big ticket rainfall event—which will lead to significant flooding—is diminishing this week. Therefore we are lowering out Space City Weather Flood Scale alert level to Stage 1. This means we can mostly expect nuisance street flooding over the next couple of days.

That’s not to say the rain is over.

Showers will continue to be possible along the coast this afternoon and tonight. On Thursday, we expect showers to be more scattered in nature, offering a nice reprieve. But beginning Thursday night we could see redevelopment of more widespread activity, and then the potential for moderate or even heavy briefly rainfall on Friday and into Saturday morning. Overall accumulations will likely be in the neighborhood of 1 to 3 inches of rainfall, with higher isolated amounts possible south of Interstate 10, closer to the coast, and east of Houston. Even though the region’s soils are saturated, we just don’t see a huge threat to the metro area. Obviously, we’ll be tracking things closely until the risk is over.

Unless there’s a change in our thinking, we’ll next update on Thursday morning.