Forecasters see a brief break in rainy weather

We’ve been whipped by tornadic winds, drenched by torrential rains and hit by hurtful hailstones. Now we may get a chance to clean up some of the mess.

The word sunny has reappeared in local forecasts.

The forecast calls for clouds Thursday morning and evening, but in between, there’s only a 20 percent chance of rain.

“We could see a bit of a break the next couple of days,” said Matt Stalley, a National Weather Service meteorologist in the Fort Worth office. “Not everyone will see rain on Friday.”

Friday’s forecast has a 30 to 40 percent chance of precipitation, rising to 50 percent on Saturday.

“It looks like the more severe stuff will return on Saturday and Sunday,” Stalley said. “We’re in a pretty active pattern and there’s no reason to think that will change in the near future.”

The same was true across much of the state. Parts of West Texas received heavy rain Wednesday, as did Austin and the larger Central Texas region, where a tornado warning was issued at one point Wednesday.

Areas south of Houston were swamped with up to 10 inches of rain, and emergency crews were searching Wednesday for a man they believed was swept away by flood waters in Clear Lake. The weather service issued flash flood warnings for many regions.

Neighborhood streets in Corpus Christi were flooded and city officials hurried to contain a sewage overflow that resulted in the discharge of about 198,000 gallons of waste water.

At D/FW Airport, as of Wednesday 19.28 inches of rain had fallen this year. The normal amount is just over 13 inches.

The Richland-Chambers reservoir, a source of water for Tarrant County, is full for the first time since April 2012.

“This wet spring has been great for our entire system,” said Chad Lorance of the Tarrant Regional Water District. “Even Lake Bridgeport has seen some significant recovery after being 24 feet low for a couple of years.

“It also really helps when our terminal storage reservoirs at Arlington and Benbrook are full because then we don’t have to pump so much water from East Texas.

“Approximately 80 percent of the water we use in Tarrant County comes from Richland-Chambers and Cedar Creek reservoirs. So having those two full going into summer is very important.”

This report includes material from The Associated Press and the Corsicana Daily Sun.

This story was originally published May 13, 2015 at 9:39 PM with the headline "Forecasters see a brief break in rainy weather."