Hurricane Harvey Caused Unprecedented Freshwater Inflow to Galveston Bay
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Hurricane Harvey Caused Unprecedented Freshwater Inflow to Galveston Bay Kristen M. Thyng1 · Robert D. Hetland1 · Scott A. Socolofsky2 · Nelun Fernando3 · Evan L. Turner3 · Caimee Schoenbaechler3 Received: 25 February 2020 / Revised: 24 June 2020 / Accepted: 3 July 2020 © Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation 2020
Abstract Hurricane Harvey heavily impacted Texas in August 2017 due to an extreme amount of rainfall, especially in the large metropolitan area in and around Houston. There was an offshore storm surge associated with Harvey, and while it raised the water level in the bay, possibly prolonging flooding in the Houston area by slowing drainage, it was not responsible for flooding, as water flowed continuously out of the bay during peak flooding. Salinity measured near the mouth of the San Jacinto river dropped to 0 from 15 psu in 1.5 days after the start of storm-related outflow from the bay; the whole bay was fully freshened in 3.6 days. Depth-averaged outflow from the entrance channel reached 2 m/s. Using publicly available oceanographic data within Galveston Bay, we estimate the amount of freshwater that flowed into the bay from this rainfall to be 17±5 km3 (14 million acre feet), or about 5 times the volume of Galveston Bay itself. This is less than, but close to, the freshwater input source: 20 km3 of rain that was estimated from Doppler radar to have accumulated in the drainage basins contributing to the bay. By comparison, the freshwater inflow estimates by the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) predicts 13 km3 (11.5 million acre feet) of inflow to Galveston Bay during Hurricane Harvey. Keywords Hurricane Harvey · Extreme rainfall · Bay circulation
Introduction Hurricane Harvey (referred to hereinafter as Harvey) rapidly intensified on August 24, 2017, and attained Category 4 hurricane status just before hitting the coast near Rockport, Texas, early on August 26th. Harvey weakened to a tropical storm and lingered over land before traveling slowly offshore, staying in the Texas area until August 30th and causing extreme rainfall in the eastern part of the state for a 4–5-day period from August 25th through the 29th (see storm track shown in Fig. 1). The total rainfall is estimated from radar rain data as 95 km3 (Milliner et al. 2018). Communicated by Paul A. Montagna Kristen M. Thyng
[email protected] 1
Department of Oceanography, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
2
Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
3
Texas Water Development Board, Austin, TX, USA
Flooding from the storm was responsible for at least 68 deaths and at least $90 billion in damages due to its having occurred in one of the most populated regions of the USA (Blake and Zelinsky 2018). Measuring the volume of freshwater inflow to Galveston Bay during an extreme event like Harvey is important for understanding the effects of constituents that may be present or absent in the incoming water compared with the original bay water it replaces, as well as
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