Tropical Depression in Oklahoma

[Robert Rohloff]

Going from an exceptional drought to how much rain we have had the last couple of months is quite impressive. The lakes, rivers and watersheds are all flooding or way above normal. I still have a feeling that later this year Texas and Oklahoma will see another rain event from a tropical system. If so the flooding event might even be more wide spread. Any thoughts out there on the potential of that?

 

[Rocky Rascovich]

Late last year, you would have worked hard to convince me that we were ready to come out of our drought pattern, I was truly concerned that this year would have been the year that we would have been in the frying pan. Man, I sure was wrong on this... thank God!

I started to have a glimmer of hope when back to back major blizzards bathed the high plains with copious amounts of moisture back in late Dec/Jan., then came the excessive rains in March over much of the southern plains. I knew then that this could possibly be a wet spring overall.

This current pattern we're in has me bewildered.. and just reinforces my belief that at least in the long term, if you don't like the weather here in Oklahoma... wait a year or two

Here at my farm, we're up to almost 15" since May 1rst.. I've never seen it so green. Unfortunately while last year many farmers lost their crop to drought, my neighbours who work several hundred acres of wheat, some lost there crop AGAIN this year, this time, too much rain.

As far as the immediate future, thismornings GFS seems to suggest that this overall pattern will be slow to change.. After the 4th, a gradual drying is in order, but with so much moisture, the ET's will contribute to lots of low level moisture, hence, we'll see occassional pop up showers and t-storms indefinitely onless we get a really good and capped.

As for the rest of the summer season, I do see increasing chances that some place here in the southern plains may get affected from a decaying hurricane. The way I'm seeing this evolve, I'll be almost suprised if we don't have at least one major hurricane making landfall somewhere in TX. this year.... I hope I'm wrong on this too, as I'm sure you know, that will cause our gas prices to skyrocket with all the oil rigs around the coast.

So.... meanwhile, I'm sure enjoying the rain, much rather have this then drought and seering heat any day.

BTW: Saw a beautiful laminar tilted funnel just west of Guthrie yesterday coming home from my chase debaucle to the Dakota's. My camera gear was in the trunk.

 

[cedwards]

The lakes, rivers and watersheds are all flooding or way above normal.

Surprizingly, this is not true of ALL lakes. Shawnee Lake is just now at normal levels. The city of Shawnee is still under water rationing. Imagion the agony. I still can only water the lawn on odd days. How am I ever going to keep the grass green?

 

[Michael O'Keeffe]

Kansas has gotten its share of rain during this system. Though nothing even compares to what is happening in OK or TX we are expierencing a type of depressing moderate shower it has been raining for over 36 hours with only a few hours break. It did rain for 25 straight hours before we got a break yesturday evening before more rain started around midnight last night. The rain today has actually been quite heavy at times. Still raining...ugh. More rain for the chase party maybe, but lucky it should just be scattered.

 

[Jordan Hartley]

It has rained off and on since tuesday but not compared to what we got here in the last 48 hours even today where I work about 11 mi E of ICT it has been non-stop. Id say we've picked up at least another 2-4 inches maybe more im just taking a guess. Fairly strong downpours in Se Ks/Ne OK and a pretty good looking cell SW of Chanute attm and an impressive line of rain is moving in as im typing this. It has to be the heaviest and most persistant downpour of the day, 30-35 dbz. Im going to get pictures of the walnut river for sure tommorow just W of Augusta,ks maybe on sunday as well about 4 mi NE of Ark City,Ks. Seems to be a river that floods often when it rains like this and if it does I want to get some pictures of it.

 

[jladue]

Having had a chance to look at more charts, it appears to be more of a baroclinic system, as it seems to exhibit vertical tilt and there's plenty of northerly winds in the high plains region. I wonder why this thing has not been picked up by the prevailing westerlies though.

Tim

This was a complicated system that I believe fit the bill of a warm core system with an occasional surface reflection. The introduction of a surface front influenced the nature of this system in a somewhat analogous way to that of a landfalling tropical cyclone encountering a front. Did you see how the front was warped by the low? Then much of the rain wound up on the northwest side of the low. This evolution seems inline with baroclinic conversion of tropical cyclones.

The Southern Plains have had events of past where cutoff cold core lows made the transition after being subjected to relatively high CAPE convection. One I was thinking of was up in Osage County in July of the late 1990's where 17" rain fell overnight from a stationary MCS. The low transitioned to warm core. Both that one and the present one produced surface circulations.

What's to prevent a tropical cyclone formation overland? An answer is a lack of a continuous latent heat source. But there's been an interesting development of a true tropical cyclone over the deserts of northern Australia sometime last year or so. I believe the desert was drenched by previous rains and then solar heating warmed the ground. The next disturbance actually fed off the hot, wet ground.

Jeff S quipped:

I tried to explain the fact that the vast majority of the reason why we've seen flooding rains the past 10 days is the extremely intense MCS that rolled through KS/OK/TX last week. No doubt, the large amount of latent heating from extreme vertical mass flux courtesy of 4000-7500 j/kg CAPE over a large area helped to create this mid-level low that has plauged the area for a while now. And to think -- if we had seen a cap bust that day, there'd be a good chance that we'd be dry and hot now.

Funny you say that. I wrote a blog post at http://towerofstorms.net/offload/archives/89

I'm beginning to wonder if this two weeks of rain after that MCS may lead to other obvious downstream impacts?

 

[Mike Smith]

Record flooding in a number of areas of southeast Kansas where two-day rainfalls exceed 14 inches in places.

PRELIMINARY LOCAL STORM REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE WICHITA KS
936 AM CDT SAT JUN 30 2007

.TIME... ...EVENT... ...CITY LOCATION... ...LAT.LON

.DATE... ....MAG.... ..COUNTY LOCATION..ST.. ...SOURCE.

..REMARKS..

0935 AM HEAVY RAIN 4 NW FREDONIA 37.57N 95.88W
06/30/2007 E6.00 INCH WILSON KS TRAINED SPOTTER

6 INCHES OF RAINFALL REPORTED SINCE FRIDAY EVENING. 21
INCHES OF RAIN HAS BEEN REPORTED THROUGH THIS ENTIRE
RAINFALL EVENT.


:
: ARKANSAS-RED BASIN RIVER FORECAST CENTER
: TULSA OKLAHOMA
:
: 24 HOUR PRECIPITATION OBSERVATIONS ... 06/30/2007
:
.B TUA 20070630 DH12/PPDRZ
: CO-OP...METAR...AND MUNICIPAL ALERT SYSTEM REPORTS
FREK1:FREDONIA KS:10.00,HMBK1:HUMBOLDT KS: 6.90
CFVK1:COFFEYVILLE 2NW KS: 6.57,SHPK1:SHARPE 3E KS: 5.59
HALK1:HALE KS: 5.22,CEDK1:CEDAR VALE 5SSE KS: 4.70
CNYK1:COLONY KS: 4.65,CBDK1:CAMBRIDGE 1SE KS: 4.42

 

[Chris Nuttall]

There are a couple of places on the Verdegris River that will be near/over record high levels. The AHPS from TSA really shows it too...along with some good descriptions of what to expect at certain levels.
http://ahps.srh.noaa.gov/index.php?wfo=tsa


Checking some info from the Tulsa District-Corps of Engineers website, it shows Hulah Lake on the Caney River west of Bartlesville as being 34 feet above normal. That puts it at 109.5% capacity of the flood control pool. That has to be putting it close to overtopping the dam.
http://www.swt-wc.usace.army.mil/HULA.lakepage.html

 

[Justin Turcotte]

The oil refinery in Coffeyville, KS is flooded and there is some 1000 barrels of oil and additional waste product spilled. Flooding is bad enough but having the crude on top make a real hard to clean mess. The refinery is a 113,000 barrel/day operation producing some 2 million gallons of gasoline per day. Some economic impact thus far overshadowed the far greater human impact. Prayers are with those folks down there.

 

[Gabe Garfield]

Does anyone know of a reason why this shouldn't continue through the rest of the summer? To me, it looks like this upper-low will be a rather persistent feature given that the ridge is firmly entrenched over the northern tier states.

With a continuous stream of Gulf moisture, there will plenty of latent heat available for convection for the rest of the summer. As has been the case the last couple of weeks, nearly-continuous convection will keep the upper-low from "spinning down," presumably due to processes that also enhance tropical cyclones (i.e., vorticity stretching, etc.). Furthermore, I don't see any reason (as of yet) why this system should kick out anytime soon, as any waves that would get the job done are much too far away to have an effect.

FWIW, the GFS has this system moving clockwise away from the Southern Plains for the next few days, and then back again (toward the middle of July).

Gabe