Heavy Rain Coming For The Gulf Coast – National Weather Outlook For January 4, 2024

by | Jan 4, 2024 | Weather

National Weather Forecast

On Thursday, a system in the Southwestern United States will produce snow in the Four Corners region with storms in the Southern Plains. A system working into the Pacific Northwest will bring rain and higher-elevation snowfall. Snow showers – some caused by lake effect – will occur in the Great Lakes and New England.

The heaviest rain through the end of the week will fall across portions of the Texas and Louisiana coast and areas just inland from there, where some 3”+ amounts will be possible.

The heaviest snow through the end of the week will be out in the western United States, where several mountain ranges could see at least 6-12” of snowfall.

_______________________________________________

From NYC to DC and beyond, cities on the East Coast are sinking

More from Phys.org: “Major cities on the U.S. Atlantic coast are sinking, in some cases as much as 5 millimeters per year—a decline at the ocean’s edge that well outpaces global sea level rise, confirms new research from Virginia Tech and the U.S. Geological Survey. Particularly hard hit population centers such as New York City and Long Island, Baltimore, and Virginia Beach and Norfolk are seeing areas of rapid “subsidence,” or sinking land, alongside more slowly sinking or relatively stable ground, increasing the risk to roadways, runways, building foundations, rail lines, and pipelines, according to a study published today in the PNAS Nexus. “Continuous unmitigated subsidence on the U.S. East Coast should cause concern,” said lead author Leonard Ohenhen, a graduate student working with Associate Professor Manoochehr Shirzaei at Virginia Tech’s Earth Observation and Innovation Lab. “This is particularly in areas with a high population and property density and a historical complacency toward infrastructure maintenance.””

Could 2024 be a breakout year for the transmission grid?

More from Canary Media: “It’s hard to solve a challenge as sprawling and complex as doubling or tripling the scale of the transmission grids across the U.S. in a little over a decade. But the country’s climate and clean energy goals depend on it. Study after study has found the country can’t build renewable energy at the pace needed to rapidly decarbonize the power grid without also building a massive amount of new power lines, fast. But over the past half-decade, grid growth has slowed, not accelerated, bogged down by conflicts over siting, permitting and paying for new transmission capacity. The sheer scale of growth needed is staggering. Achieving the Biden administration’s goal of a zero-carbon grid by 2035 will require 75,000 miles of new high-voltage lines — enough to stretch from Los Angeles to New York City and back 15 times — according to an estimate from Princeton University’s Repeat Project.”

The US’s first large-scale offshore wind farm just missed its first power delivery deadline

More from electrek: “Vineyard Wind 1 was supposed to deliver its first power to the Massachusetts grid by December 31 – but it didn’t. … On December 6, Avangrid CEO Pedro Azagra said that its “team has worked tremendously hard, through nights, weekends, and holidays to put us in the position to deliver the first power from Avangrid’s nation-leading Vineyard Wind 1 project before the end of the year.” And it reiterated that deadline in a public newsletter on December 27. But an Avangrid spokesperson said this morning (via the Worcester Business Journal) that “the first of the project’s 62 turbines generated power Sunday evening but that more testing was required before any wind power could be transmitted to the grid. The spokesman gave no new specific timeline for the delivery of first power.””

_______________________________________________

Follow me on:

Thanks for checking in and have a great day!

– D.J. Kayser