National Weather Service Adds New Colors So It Can Map Harvey's Rains

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/28/546776542/national-weather-service-adds-new-colors-so-it-can-map-harveys-rains

August 28, 20171:50 PM ET

The colors the National Weather Service uses to show rainfall on its weather map couldn't represent the deluge in southeastern Texas, so the NWS added two more purple shades to its map. The old scale topped out at more than 15 inches; the new limit tops 30 inches.

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While the old scale used 13 colors from light green to dark purple to depict precipitation from 0.1 inch to greater than 15 inches, the new one resets that dark purple color to denote 15-20 inches of rain — and tacks on two more lighter shades of purple to denote 20-30 inches and "greater than 30 inches."

Those new levels are not hypothetical, as many residents along the middle Texas coast and inland areas can attest.

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https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/28/16217626/harvey-houston-flood-water-visualized

Sept. 1, 2017

It’s hard to fathom the amount of rain Hurricane Harvey dumped on Texas and Louisiana. Some weather stations in the region recorded more than 50 inches (over 4 feet!).

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over six days, 27 trillion gallons of water fell over Texas and Louisiana, as Ryan Maue, a meteorologist with WeatherBell, told CNN. (The calculation is simple, he says on Twitter: It’s depth of rain multiplied by the number of square miles covered.) That’s one million gallons of water for nearly every person who lives in Texas.

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