First Alert Weather In-Depth: Too much water

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WHEC) — The First Alert Weather Team is talking about the potential for some flooding and there’s a complicated setup behind why it could happen.

Number one, milder air is streaming in through the Ohio Valley into Western New York. Temperatures have gone up significantly higher through the afternoon. So that is going to produce a significant amount to the melting of the snow and the ice. On top of this, there is some rain in the forecast – maybe a heavy rain. This shows some of the different computer modeling on rainfall and they are all show close to an inch of total rainfall. So if you put this all together – the rainfall with an inch of rain and then the melting snow. It becomes a problem for localized flooding.

When you take all of that snowpack and melt it down, by some estimates, there is the potential for 2 to 4 inches of liquid locked up in that snow and ice. That means the snow piles in the supermarket parking lot will diminish and all of that water runs off into the system. So if you do the math we could be looking at anywhere from 3 to 4 inches of liquid that gets run into the area creeks and streams. The ground is frozen so it is not going to soak the excess water. All of that water leads to a flood potential.

No surprise that we do have a flood watch in effect for all of Western New York as we go through the next 48 hours.