Severe weather is impacting much of Texas this week. More than three inches of rain fell in New Braunfels along the stretch of I-35 north of San Antonio last night. Numerous high-water rescues have been reported in and around the Alamo City after relentless rain.
More than five inches of precipitation were reported in some parts of Bexar County. Further east, Houston is facing a level 3 out of 4 flash flood threat. Heavy storms continue in east-central Texas on a line into North and East Texas.
Meanwhile, some ominous scenes in West Texas, including a towering wall of dust near the Davis Mountains moving into the Trans-Pecos. This Saharan dust is set to move further east, reaching some of Texas’s biggest cities as early as tomorrow.
In places like Austin, the skies appear a bit smoggy as the dust begins rolling in.
Justin Ballard, a meteorologist with the Houston Chronicle, said Saharan dust over Texas is fairly normal for this time of year.
“(The) baseline ozone around Houston, San Antonio to Austin, let’s just say is code yellow. So the Saharan dust can often increase that air quality by another kind of level. So code orange,” he said.
“That’s when ozone alerts are issued by local National Weather Service forecast offices. It’s not the sort of impact that everyone will have effects, but certainly those who are sensitive, those who have respiratory problems, pulmonary problems, certainly could feel some of those sort of allergy-like problems.”
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For areas with heavy rainfall, Ballard said there should be a reprieve from the dust for a little while.
“In terms of impacts today, there really aren’t very many impacts from dust early this Thursday morning, or really even this afternoon or this evening, thanks to that rain,” he said.
“But on a normal sort of day-to-day basis when it’s dry and we’ve got this dust hanging overhead, because it’s so high up in the atmosphere, it tends to not necessarily cause major problems with ground-level pollution. We see more of that just on a day-to-day basis during the summer from cars.”
Looking at the forecast over the weekend, Ballard said more storms are possible but he doesn’t expect wall-to-wall rain.
“Once we get into this afternoon, we’ll start to ease up some of the rainfall rates, but we’re not done with that yet,” he said. “We’ve got more heavy rain expected Friday morning. And then we could see more showers and storms developed during the afternoon hours on Saturday and Sunday.
So an unsettled pattern for sure, but I do think the heaviest rain will fall between today and tomorrow.”
