As expected, rainfall was widespread and heavy across much of the central and Eastern two-thirds of Texas on Tuesday night and Wednesday. The above image depicts rainfall totals through 6am CST Yesterday morning, which roughly corresponds to the time that heavy rains were ending across the Austin-San Antonio corridor. Additional heavy rain fell later in the day further East across east-central and southeast Texas.
At my home near Kyle, TX, we received 6.75 inches of rain Tuesday night. I know that sounds impressive by itself, but to drive the point home even further, you have to know that we didn't receive that much rain in the first 5 months of 2011 combined!
The official observing station for Austin, located at Bergstrom International Airport, received 5.66 inches of rain, which was a new record for the day. The old record was a mere 0.99 inch set back in 1973. The 5.66 inches yesterday also set a new single day rainfall record for the month of January, and was also the 8th wettest day ever recorded in Austin. (The all time daily rainfall ever recorded in Austin was 8.70 inches on November 23, 1974).
The image below is a zoom-in of the first image, centered on the Austin/San Antonio area. You can see that very heavy rains of 5-8 inches were widespread from northeast San Antonio through southeast Austin, and points just to the East of that line:
In San Antonio, 2.94 inches of rain was measured at the official observing station at the airport (which was also a daily record), but as you can see on the map above, much heavier amounts fell just to the East of there across much of eastern San Antonio.
The rains were certainly very welcome, as we've been suffering from an extensive drought across the region for the last year. As is typical when you receive that much rain in such a short period of time (i.e., 6 hours or so), flash flooding and small stream flooding were widespread across the region yesterday morning.
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