Austin area to get rain, storms
Central Texas, along with most of state, declared drought-free.
As the threat of severe storms looms again for the Austin metro area, Central Texas and nearly the rest of the state were deemed drought-free this week, according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Compared with last week, when 21.5 percent of the state was at some level of drought, the data found only about 9.2 percent of the state “abnormally dry” — the mildest level of drought — and only 0.6 percent in moderate drought, a level that indicates low water levels and some damage to crops.
Only three weeks ago, on Oct. 20 — after a particularly dry September but before the record-setting Halloween weekend floods — more than 63 percent of the state was under drought conditions. A little more than a fifth of Texas was in extreme or exceptional drought, the highest levels of drought, which indicate widespread crop losses and major water shortages.
On Friday, the city of San Marcos said it will end all drought restrictions Sunday, largely because of the one-two punch from flooding over the Memorial Day and Halloween weekends.
“El Niño has finally kicked in and we have received some significant rainfall events that have caused aquifer levels to rise rapidly, allowing us to skip Stage 1 (water restrictions) and go directly from Stage 2 to no drought restrictions,” the city’s executive director of public services, Tom Taggart, said in a statement. San Marcos briefly lifted water restrictions in June but revived them in August.
Among the two other large Central Texas cities, Round Rock lifted all water restrictions May 29, but Austin is maintaining its Stage 2 restrictions, which limit watering days for homeowners and businesses.
Moisture from the Gulf of Mexico is expected to increase during the weekend before a cold front arrives in the region late Monday, the weather service said. The cooler, denser air of the cold front will act like a bulldozer and push the warm Gulf moisture up into the upper atmosphere, where
it will condense into a squall line of storms, National Weather Service hydrologist Cory Van Pelt said.
The squall line — a moving wall of storms that can be hundreds of miles long but typically only 10 or 20 miles wide — is expected to pass through Austin before dawn Tuesday, Van Pelt said, with gusty winds violently slinging rain and hail that forecasters say will definitely wake you up.
“You could get an inch or two of rain with these storms, but they won’t be sitting over an area dumping rain” as we’ve seen storms do before, Van Pelt said. “You should see the storms coming; it gets noisy for a while, then it’s over.”