ReduceFlooding.com published an explainer on Saturday, October 10, walking through what makes a hurricane form, strengthen and weaken, and why a falling wind category does not always mean a falling flood risk. Bob Rehak, who writes the site, uses Hurricane Isaias as the current example and Hurricane Harvey as the cautionary one, pointing out that Harvey’s winds dropped sharply after landfall while the storm stalled and produced catastrophic rainfall across the Houston area anyway.
The piece covers the conditions that favor development, warm water, moist air and low wind shear, and the ones that pull a storm apart, strong shear, dry air, cooler water and landfall. Its closing point is the one with local weight: the Saffir-Simpson category describes wind, not rain, so a weaker storm on paper can still be the one that floods.
ReduceFlooding.com covers flooding and drainage in the San Jacinto River basin, which drains into Lake Houston, so its explainers speak directly to how storms behave over Kingwood, Humble, Atascocita and Huffman.
