A driveway off of Highway 11 near Sperry is covered with water during rainstorms and flooding near Tulsa on Tuesday, March 20, 2012. JOHN CLANTON/Tulsa World
Lightning rips through the sky behind the Kimberly Clark plant in Paris, Texas Monday, March 19, 2012 as severe thunderstorms moved through North East Texas dumping inches of rain and heavy winds along the way. (AP PHOTO/The Paris News, Sam Craft)
Here is the satellite image from 10:30 or so Monday morning. You can see extensive cloud cover over most of Oklahoma. That's the rain. (NOAA)
Well, at least your garden will look great this spring, right?!
Speaking of spring, how incredibly fitting that the first day of spring would be so spring-like.
As I’m sure you’re well aware, it rained a little bit this week. Like, it rained a whole lot this week.
The last time we had this much rain in a three-day period (And I’m including today, despite the fact we could get more) was August 10, 11, 12 of last year: 4.5 inches. So far, we’re at 4.28 inches for March 19, 20, 21. That August total includes a one-day rainfall amount of 3.44 inches in Tulsa. The one-day high total from this week was 2.81 inches Monday.
All that rain in Tulsa means flash floods on streets, which we saw. Other parts of eastern Oklahoma had in excess of 7 inches for the storm total. That also causes flash floods, obviously.
And river flooding. Most of that flooding wasn’t severe (especially compared to the records set last year) and it has already started to recede.
It was impressive in some places. Bird Creek near Sperry rose 20 feet in 24 hours. And it has fallen 12.65 feet in the last 17 hours. The Neosho River near Commerce rose more than 15 feet in 36 hours up to the moderate flood stage, where it still is.
But, we’re still in drought conditions in northeast Oklahoma from our brutal summer. That has really started to diminish over the past few months, but the ground is still thirsty. Tomorrow’s drought condition update will include Monday’s rainfall, but not all of Tuesday’s. Still, it will be interesting to see how that changes.
What won’t change much on the drought map is the Panhandle. Poor Panhandle. While they got just a tiny amount of rain out there, it won’t matter much.
So, you’ve heard about the rain (and if you want more, read my story from today’s paper here). What we haven’t talked about is the severe weather. There were tornado warnings in northeast Oklahoma Monday!
There were favorable conditions in southeast Oklahoma for the formation of severe storms, some that could have produced tornadoes. A front cooled the air in and around Tulsa and took us out of the tornado equation, but some of those storms did rotate enough to cause concern for NWS forecasters later in the evening.
In fact, Amy Jankowski said NWS surveyors were out near Cedarville, Ark., right across the border, to look at storm damage there to determine if it was a tornado Monday night. There were apparently about 15 trees between 1 and 2 feet in diameter that were uprooted or broken off there. Other trees were reported down in Roland and a barn was blown into a house in Muldrow.
Most of the heavy, convective bands of rain are east of us now, but you can’t rule out a shower over today or tomorrow.
All this will FINALLY move out just in time for a beautiful sunny and warm weekend. So, shake off that cabin fever and enjoy it.
--Jerry Wofford
