AUSTIN, Texas — May is historically the wettest month of the year in Central Texas, and it's already living up to it's reputation!
Widespread showers and storms moved through the area Wednesday evening through Thursday morning, bringing much-needed rain during our continuous drought.
There are still ongoing showers and storms, with more on the way for Thursday afternoon and the upcoming weekend. For now, we thought we'd give you a quick look at some of the rainfall totals from over the past 24 hours and how they're impacting our lake levels.
Based off of radar-estimated totals, the largest rainfall over the past day was mostly detected in Blanco, Mason and Milam counties. Projections show several inches of rainfall within these areas. Blanco County experienced a Flash Flood Warning Wednesday evening and saw official rain gauge totals of more than 4 inches!
Additional heavy showers and storms moved into Milam County Thursday morning and have increased rainfall totals to more than 2.5 inches for some parts of the county.
Thankfully, we saw fairly widespread rain west of Interstate 35 – but did it help our lake levels? The answer is yes, but just not much as we would've liked. As of 9 a.m. Thursday, Lake Travis is still sitting at 38% capacity and Lake Buchanan is at 48% capacity. However, both lake levels increased.
Lake Travis saw the largest increase, but only by 1.44 inches. Lake Buchanan went up by an even smaller increment of 0.72 inches. Additional runoff from the rain will help feed into the lakes throughout the coming days.
A new drought monitor was released early Thursday morning, but this doesn't factor in the rain from Wednesday evening's storms.
This week's monitor shows minor improvements in the drought for both Williamson and Burnet counties. The level of severe and extreme drought along and west of I-35 remains unchanged.
Impacts from the recent rain will be included in next week's drought monitor update. Our forecast still calls for several more round of rain for the workweek and weekend, so stay tuned with the KVUE Weather Team for more updates!
