The Midwest has been clobbered by heavy rainfall and severe thunderstorms for most of June. This stormy pattern is set to continue, causing rivers to swell to record territory.
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00:00All right, joining me right now is AccuWeather flood expert Alex Sosnowski.
00:04Alex, earlier in the summer, couldn't get a drop of rain across the Plains states here.
00:09The epicenter of the drought was across central parts of Iowa and in the South Dakota.
00:15I want to show you this graphic here.
00:17This is the rainfall just for the last seven days, Alex.
00:22And you can see radar estimates, especially around Sioux Falls and in parts of southern Minnesota.
00:28That's where the rain has been heaviest.
00:30Yeah, so what you're looking at here, as you said, is the rainfall totals here for the past seven days.
00:35And to put that in perspective, in some cases that's a month's worth of rain,
00:39in some cases two months' worth of rain, all coming in the span of several days.
00:44So that's why we're getting the runoff.
00:46At first it was in the small streams.
00:48Now it's hitting some of the secondary rivers and it's also starting to hit some of the major rivers,
00:52including the Mississippi and the Missouri as well.
00:55You saw some of the footage earlier from the Blue Earth River just south of Mankato.
01:01In fact, you could see all that water is out of their banks.
01:05It's causing some problems here.
01:07But it's not the only river that's experiencing problems in that area, Alex.
01:12No, there's about a dozen rivers or so that I counted that are involved.
01:17That's the Mainstem and the West Fork of the Des Moines, the Little Sioux and Big Sioux Rivers,
01:23the Vermilion, the James, Rock, Cedar.
01:26Even getting, as I said, the upper portion of the Mississippi involved now
01:31and also a portion of the Missouri River are going to have some problems with this.
01:36If you're not experiencing major flooding in some of those rivers,
01:39you probably will over the span of the next several days to as much as the next couple of weeks.
01:45It takes a while for that water to work its way down into the larger rivers.
01:49Even where there's flood control, they have to release some of that water.
01:52They can't hold it all back.
01:54You're looking at footage right now in McCook, South Dakota, Alex.
01:58Again, that's a good point.
02:00It's going to take some time for a lot of these rivers to come on down.
02:04I know it varies based on the river, but a general time length,
02:09assuming we don't get any more rain, how long is it going to take?
02:13That's a big assumption that we're not going to get any more rain.
02:16We are.
02:17It's not going to hit all the exact same areas at the same time,
02:20but it's going to be the summertime nature of rainfall.
02:23It's spotty, and we're going to see that.
02:26But the point is we are going to see additional rain.
02:28I love to say that we're not going to get any more rain here,
02:30and this will all go away here in a week or two,
02:33but it's not how things are stacking up, unfortunately.
02:36It's going to take a while.
02:39You're going to have surges of water coming down all the way, I think,
02:42to St. Louis with this.
02:43That's where the Missouri comes in.
02:45It may not be major flooding there,
02:47but there's certainly going to be a minor to moderate flood
02:51probably occurring over the next week or two, I think.
02:54Alex, I want to get your impression of this graphics,
02:57this drawn up by our long-range forecasting department,
03:00led by Paul Pasteluk and Joe Lumberg.
03:02I mean, this is the pattern that we're going to be seeing in mid-July,
03:05and I want to point you to the area that they're pointing to.
03:08Now, like you said, it's not going to be every day,
03:11but within this next two weeks, there's more rounds of thunderstorms coming.
03:16Yeah, and that may even expand a little bit farther to the south,
03:20which is a bit of a concern that I have.
03:22This may shift a little bit farther south over time, not much,
03:26but that's as the surge is coming down,
03:28so then you get more water coming into where the surge is hitting at the same time.
03:31You may have more problems cropping up farther south in places like Iowa,
03:36Nebraska, and Illinois as the pattern continues to evolve.
03:41This is the same pattern that we saw farther south in Texas,
03:44where we had the heat dome in Mexico,
03:46and the northern edge of that causing rounds of storms coming across Texas and Louisiana.
03:51Now everything is set up farther north here,
03:54so it's not surprising to see that we're getting that on the northern edge of the heat dome.
03:58Our regional expert, Alex Cisnowski.
04:00Alex, thanks for joining us here on AccuWeather.
04:03My pleasure, Bernie.