15th anniversary of Tropical Storm Allison's flooding
Fifteen years ago, residents in the Southeast had no idea that Tropical Storm Allison would go on a nine-state rampage, flooding communities for over two weeks before finally moving out to sea.
Weather blogger Bill Murray notes that Allison was the most damaging tropical storm (never increased to hurricane strength) on record and the only one to ever have its name retired.
As I wrote in my retrospective "To All the Storms I've Loved Before... in 2012:
In 2001, Tropical Storm Allison dropped as much as 40 inches of rain on Texas, and I was there with my first photoshop creation -- a combination of two of our television graphics!
Back then, I was the only person who could create the weather stories -- today we have a team of a dozen wonderful folks who report on hurricanes, but I still pull long days and nights helping them out.
This year, we've redrawn our precipitation map in hi-def:
NOAA says that the maximum rainfall amount during Tropical Storm Allison was 40.68 inches in Jefferson County, Texas. A lot of that was due to the track of the storm, which did a loop over Texas. Here's a month's worth of rainfall data -- you can see where the heaviest rain fell along the track:
A lot of this heavy rainfall fell in Harris County, where they have a city-wide rain gauge network for Houston. The winner? "Stream Elevation Sensor 1603 P100_1600 Greens Bayou @ Mount Houston Parkway," which received a total of 39.25 inches -- 29 inches falling in less than 12 hours!
Several other stations recorded over 30 inches during that fateful week!
The NWS in Houston has a retrospective report on Tropical Storm Allison containing these photos:
Here are a few more miscellaneous graphics I found:
And finally, a video recap from a local TV station:
