ORLANDO, Fla. – Kerrville, Texas, has been ravaged by what will likely go down as a historic flash flood event primarily induced by a tropical storm many suggest should not have ever been named.
On the Fourth of July, the perfect storm set up came together and produced what are called “training rains” for an isolated portion of central Texas.
What was leftover from Tropical Storm Barry is what supercharged the atmosphere in way of adding additional DEEP tropical moisture from the Caribbean and the Gulf, really amping up how much water came down in such quick bursts over central Texas.
This is why, despite Barry being “sloppy, disorganized, weak,” whichever adjectives you want to throw down on the table, all tropical systems matter. They come in very distinct shapes and sizes, and need monitoring regardless of landfall potential.
In this case, Barry came ashore as a tiny circulation over eastern/northern Mexico. The center itself was small, similar to Milton which formed in the Bay of Campeche in October 2024.
However, the entirety of the storm carried an enormous plume of moisture from remnants of the Central American Gyre. It also helped to channel some of the tropical moisture from the Eastern Pacific into the southern region of the U.S.
To tie it all into a nice bundle, our pattern over North America was preparing to flip. We went from high pressure ridging over the east and southeast, helping to funnel all this tropical moisture northward, to troughing extending down from up north, bullying it back toward the south.
This creates convergence, a pivotal mechanism needed for storm formation.
The same frontal boundary that came down across us in Central Florida, which went on to spawn our most organized tropical storm of the season, Chantal, also pinched off some of its energy over Texas.
The leftovers festered, helping to instigate the formation of heavy rains that sat overhead for an extended period of time.
Let’s look at it all together.
Tropical Storm Barry ran ashore in eastern Mexico, and was essentially shredded by the higher terrain features only a few hundred miles inland. Sure, the tropical circulation was gone, but the added moisture in the air remained.
Kind of reminds you of the Conservation of Energy you learn in science. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It has to go somewhere, or its stored. In this case, you can say a little of both took place.
Tropical moisture was drawn northward by the wind flow across much of Texas. Then, as the trough came down from up north, it stopped this incoming moist air in its tracks. Think of it like squishing all this energy into one specific spot. Lastly, on either side of Texas we had upper level spins. An upper low to the east, and the monsoon high driving the desert southwest monsoon season.
That essentially created a great corridor of winds highest up in the atmosphere to generate even more lift.
This is precisely why when you watch radar replay for the areas devastated by the floods, you notice the rains just don’t go anywhere. They stay in almost the same spot for hours on end.
The National Weather Service did as they could to generate as much lead time as possible. Lead time is basically advance warning that an area, county, organization, asset requires before a bad weather scenario unfolds.
Had the National Hurricane Center not sent planes into what became Tropical Storm Barry, we would not have gathered the necessary info and data to then track this tropical plume of moisture inland.
The remnants of Barry acted to mash the throttle pedal for our folks in the south, generating far more precipitable water (water that can then fall as rain) than if it were just a front coming down across the area.
So while Barry was no Milton, it certainly wasn’t a waste of a name. Nor was it foul on the hurricane center’s part to designate this as a named storm.
We have to get away from this idea that anything less than a major hurricane doesn’t warrant any type of observance let alone respect. The first portion of our hurricane season is most typically characterized by “sloppy” systems forming off the coast of North America.
Recovery efforts are underway, and will continue for the foreseeable future. If you have the means of donating or volunteering to assist in any way, shape, or form, it would be highly encouraged you do so. We can’t do anything outside of get out of the way best we can when Mother Nature throws her worst at you.
But we can absolutely make a difference when folks are hurting post-disaster.