Photo of the Week: Remembering the August 2016 Louisiana Floods
Panorama of my parents' neighborhood at the height of the flooding. My parents' house is the one on the left side of the image on top of the hill. On Friday, August 12, 2016, it started raining in Lafayette. Over the next two days, we would receive nearly 21 inches of rain (about one-third of the average annual rainfall). This was not the result of a tropical cyclone, but a large, persistent, and slow-moving MCS with access to a deep fetch of tropical moisture. Radar loop from NWS New Orleans. The spin you see is weak low pressure, not related to any kind of tropical storm or hurricane. Below is the 12Z (7:00 a.m. CDT) sounding from Slidell, LA the morning of August 12th (image created using SHARPpy). The vertical red line in the upper-left panel is temperature, and the green line is dewpoint. With these two lines nearly on top of each other from ground-level to the tropopause, we can see that the environment is extremely saturated. In fact, the sounding parameters in the low