Officials in Texas and Louisiana are sounding the alarm ahead of Tropical Storm Nicholas making landfall along the central Texas coast tonight as either a strong tropical storm or a low-end Category 1 hurricane.
Hurricane Watches and Storm Surge Watches were up for portions of the southeast Texas Coast, including Galveston Bay and Corpus Christi Bay.
At the 4:00 p.m. advisory from the National Hurricane Center, Nicholas was moving erratically about 70 miles (110 kilometers) south of Port O’Connor, Texas. The storm had maximum sustained winds of 65 mph (19 kph) and was moving to the north-northeast at a speed of 12 mph.
Nicholas is an expansive storm, with tropical-storm-force winds extending outward from its center up to 115 miles. Heavy rain associated with the outer bands is already falling on the Texas and Louisiana coasts, including across the Houston metro area.
CNN is reporting that a state of emergency was declared in Louisiana by Gov. John Bel Edwards Sunday while Texas Gov. Greg Abbott raised the state’s emergency alert level and readied incident management teams which included swift water rescue boat squads.
Wind shear and proximity to the Texas coast are factors that will tend to limit the overall strength of Nicholas, waters in the western Gulf of Mexico are well into the 80s F and more than warm enough to allow a tropical system to strengthen.
“As long as the center of Nicholas remains off the coast, there is the risk for strengthening and the possibility for it to reach Category 1 hurricane intensity prior to landfall,” AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Adam Douty said.
Regardless of strength at landfall, however, the expected impacts won’t change – the greatest threat of all being significant flash flooding. We are talking about rainfall rates that could be 3 to 4 inches per hour under the heaviest rain bands.
Storm total rainfall through midweek could be extreme in some cases. For the middle and upper Texas coast, 8 to 16 inches, with isolated maximum amounts of 20 inches are possible. Across the rest of coastal Texas into southwest Louisiana, totals could be 5 to 10 inches with locally higher amounts.
