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