Life-threatening floods expected this week

AccuWeather

Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee are expected to face flash flooding from Wednesday to Saturday.

Transcript

00:00I want to bring in our AccuWeather Flood expert, meteorologist Alex Sosnowski.

00:05Alex has been living, you lived in Kingston, near the Scranton area?

00:11Yeah, Kingston, Pennsylvania, northeastern Pennsylvania during Agnes 72, 30 feet of water

00:16on our street. So it kind of hit me hard and I never forgot it and here we are.

00:22Here we are.

00:22We have fire situations shaping up, burning as you've been talking about.

00:26Yeah, let's take a look at the ingredients.

00:28You know, this is the ingredients, classic ingredients for flash flooding, Alex.

00:33Yeah, tropical moisture coming up all the way from the Caribbean,

00:36feeding into this pretty consistent zone here.

00:39Probably as many as four rounds of heavy rain coming in four to five days

00:44from northeastern Texas all the way up to southern Ohio.

00:47Strong jet stream and that's helping to fuel the severe weather.

00:50We're going to have a severe weather event and a major flash flooding event going on

00:54at the same time, which will then culminate into a river flooding event.

00:58You can see that plume of moisture.

01:00Basically, this is going to be an atmospheric river coming all the way up from the Caribbean,

01:05all the way across the lower part of the Mississippi Valley through the Ohio Valley.

01:10Essentially, you're probably more familiar with tropical systems than you are, say,

01:16with an atmospheric river in this part of the country.

01:19This is going to be like three or four tropical storms coming up,

01:22riding over the same area in four to five days.

01:26This is going to be very serious.

01:28Let's talk about the rainfall map here, Alex, and then we'll talk about the risks here.

01:33But I mean, this is a large area of at least a half a foot of rain.

01:38Yeah, I think we're looking here.

01:41Each round is probably going to bring two to four inches of rain.

01:43But as I said, there's probably going to be three to four of these.

01:46That'll accumulate to about eight to 16 inches of rain.

01:50But we have a storm max there of 21 inches.

01:53So this is the real deal with this thing.

01:56That's two to four months worth of rain.

01:58If you look at it from a historical perspective,

02:01you're probably looking at 500 to 1,000 year rainfall coming up here with this event.

02:06Alex, you wanted this map.

02:07Explain what we're looking at here.

02:09You have about 30 seconds.

02:10Yeah, this map here, you're probably more familiar with this with severe weather.

02:14But this is almost about as extreme as it can get.

02:17And don't be surprised if it goes from extreme to catastrophic.

02:20We're looking at life-threatening flash flooding with this thing.

02:23It could be in multiple communities.

02:26And at the same time, you could have tornadoes going on,

02:28which will just tremendously add to the danger.

02:30And as I said, we're probably going to be looking at flooding on the Ohio River

02:34before this thing finishes up and significant rises on the lower portion of the Mississippi.

02:39I think the best word you used here, unfortunately,

02:42what you used, as bad as it gets, as extreme as it can get.

02:47AccuWeather flooding expert Alex Sanowski.

02:49Alex, thanks for breaking it down.

02:51Unfortunately, a sad situation setting up later this week.

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