Here comes “Tropical Blob”!

6-15-24. 1:30pm. This Tropical Outlook is brought to you by Davy Ranch Supply in Yorktown, TX. davyranchsupply.com

At this point, let's just call next week's weather system "The Tropical Blob"! Regardless of whether it becomes a tropical depression or storm, there will be a moist and juicy batch of tropical air moving into our area starting on Wednesday. As has been the case now for several days, the NHC is still going with a 50% chance that our Tropical Blob turns into something by later next week.

Now let's talk about "Precipitable Water". Just as a refresher...from Wikipedia, "Precipitable water is the depth of water in a column of the atmosphere, if all the water in that column were precipitated as rain. As a depth, the precipitable water is measured in millimeters or inches. Often abbreviated as "TPW", for Total Precipitable Water."

Normally, most days in the summer in south-central Texas, we see PW values around an inch. On Wednesday, the PW will rise to nearly 3 inches as tropical moisture streams into our area, giving us a great chance to see some very wet storms like you might see in Central American rain forests, or like what Florida saw last week. There is the potential to see some very hefty rain totals, especially along the coast later next week. The big question will be how far north and west the moisture plume will go. The GFS thinks it will go inland far enough to drop some big rains even in south-central Texas. It's still too early to know, but this looks very promising.

Below are the latest model runs and some tropical graphics. As of today, I'm rooting for the GFS model, but think the NWS and the NBM models are more likely.