Days of storms leave parts of Colorado saturated
AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reported live from Colorado on Aug. 14, looking back on days of thunderstorms that led to flash flooding.
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00:00It has been a stormy few days across parts of Northeast Colorado as hail and
00:03flooding rains have impacted many from the Front Range into the Plains.
00:07AccuWeather meteorologist Tony Laubach joins us live now from northern
00:11Colorado with some good news for those reeling after multiple rounds of storms.
00:16Tony, I know it's not as intense at the moment, but last night you had some
00:20pretty big storms nearby.
00:24Yeah, and that has been kind of a broken record here over the last several days
00:28and we're gonna kind of talk about what we're dealing with today. A little bit of
00:32storm activity. This is coming off of the foothills near the Loveland, Colorado
00:37area. We are starting to see that afternoon round of showers and storms.
00:40When you talk about the good news, we're not going to be seeing anything terribly
00:44strong or severe today. Most of that threat is shifted on east along with the
00:48moisture that fuels these storms. But yesterday, again, was just round three of
00:53many here. We're gonna take you out to Agate, Colorado. This is just to the
00:56northwest of the town of Lyman out on the Eastern Plains. So generally right
01:00along I-70 and we're gonna give you a little lesson on on some of the
01:04topography out here. What you are looking at is what is typically known as an
01:08arroya. An arroya is a dry creek bed that sometimes will transport water and in
01:14the case of what we saw yesterday, we see torrential rains that lead to what
01:18makes it now look like a raging river. This is a normally dry creek bed. I
01:22travel this route all the time and I can tell you it normally does not look as
01:26crazy as it looked as we saw last night. The reason for that was an isolated
01:31supercell that had developed and dropped copious amounts of hail and rain. And
01:35again, as we talked about here, this is just one of several rounds. We're gonna
01:39take you to a map here and show you what has looked like on the Front Range and
01:43the Eastern Plains over the last couple of days. We've seen massive amounts of
01:47rain. Notice that number there just to the northwest of Lyman. That right there
01:51is the culprit. We talk about rainfall totals there over four inches. This is
01:56Doppler radar indicated. And again, you talk about approaching that five inch
02:00mark there northwest of Lyman. You go to Fort Morgan up towards Sterling. See all
02:03those dots, those yellow and orange dots, indicative of where we've seen some of
02:08the stronger storms and the slower moving storms. Not a lot of steering
02:12current, which has really been the issue in terms of jumping those massive
02:16amounts of rain. Again, two to four inches, five inches maybe in some cases.
02:20Just in the last 48 hours, that does not take into account what we've seen prior
02:25to that over the weekend as we've had numerous storms, mainly again that hail
02:30and flooding threat. But we've had a couple of isolated tornadoes posted
02:33there as well. Bring you back live here. We changed camera angles. This looking
02:37off to the north, you kind of see the line of cumulus behind me. There's a
02:40convergence line that's setting up here. This would be north of Greeley and
02:44extending out east a little bit. Jeff, if we are going to see any severe
02:47weather in the near term, likely going to come out of this. And we talk about
02:51convergence lines. That means landspout potential as well. So we're gonna track
02:54these storms for the rest of the evening. We'll see if we see anything
02:57on the lower end. But the good news, we're not expecting widespread severe
03:00weather today. That's certainly good news there, Tony. Thanks for that
03:03report. And you got some great footage from yesterday. So we're checking back
03:07in with you for the next round. I know there's always something out there, at
03:11least this time of the year, even on the backside of true severe weather
03:15season.