Rain on me (Debby afternoon update, Monday 5 Aug)

Debby continues to decay inland. The storm has slowed down, which is bad, but it is still moving, which is good, it seems to maybe be going to go farther offshore, which is bad, but may be pulling in some dry air from the west which is good (at least if you end up in the southwest sector of the storm). So with that clarity 😛 let’s look at a few maps.

First, here is the current ( pm) radar composite:

And the radar rain rate (how fast it is coming down, 127mm/hr = 5″ per hour):

And then there is this … the mid level water vapor image:

That’s some nice dry air lurking just off to the west of the system, and maybe possibly some of it is getting entrained and pulled in. The southwestern sector of the storm is really not raining all that much.

Precipitation forecasts are probably the most difficult single variable in meteorology. The National Weather Service latest QPF (at 1:45pm) has the 15″ blob centered on Charleston, and Savannah within the 10-15″ sector …

All put together, if the storm track evolves the way it seems to be going, it might be that for Georgia this isn’t going to be the rainageddon that we expected because for at least a day of the stall we will be in that dry sector. Again, we will have to see if and where the thing slows down and stalls.

To be clear: don’t treat this lightly. There is still a good chance this will be Very Bad. So if you need to do something to protect your home, wrap that up. And don’t travel around if you don’t need to, because what we do get will probably cause street flooding. Savannah will probably top 10″ of rain (in Parkside we’re at 2″ as of 3:30pm, and some high rain rate cells are off shore headed this way, one of them has rotation in it and might spawn a tornado). But all that said there is reason to not be entirely pessimistic in Georgia (SC is another matter, but still looking at that).

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OK, it’s “Reign o’er me”, but still a great song …

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