Sunday, November 19, 2017

"...An Aerial Flood Watch..."

     When Alexa said it, I goggled.  An aerial flood?  Was I being gaslighted by a robot?  Were my radio antennas in danger?  Was the sky about to turn to water?

     The answers are, "Not exactly," "No," "No," and "No," and I should have Googled instead, but it wasn't great news.  The National Weather Service has issued something that is the approximate opposite of a Flash Flood Watch: an Areal Flood Watch, a sort of creeping, relentless rising of water than can follow prolonged heavy rain.  Ugly bureaucratese aside -- and what would  you call it, in the near Twitter-sized character allotment of a weather alert? -- it's accurate enough and we have certainly had rain enough.

     Today, all we get is cold.  And colder; when I awoke at 5:00 (not oh-dark-thirty but you can still see its fading tracks), Indianapolis was already as warm as we're going to get today: 38 degrees.  Winter is sneaking in.

4 comments:

New Jovian Thunderbolt said...

Areal Flood Watch

I learn something new every day.

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

Well, if you'd driven through what we drove through on I-469 east and south of Fort Wayne yesterday afternoon, today you might well be a believer in "aerial flooding" :)

Douglas2 said...

I was driving a few weeks ago in a storm and started hydroplaning at what I thought was a conservative speed for the conditions, even though the car was shod with good aggressive winter tires that are near top of the list at CR for not hydroplaning.

I returned home to find the areal flood warning/"avoid unnecessary travel" warning flashing on the weather radio. And by that time I had other means to work out that there was a great volume of aerial water

We had a long-term guest coming to stay in the "granny annex" where the the shower-pan had been destroyed by the previous owner, a person of great size who had weight that was outside of the limits in the shower-pan's spec-sheet. I was on-my-way to inspect a craigslist shower pan that turned out to be a) stored outside b) in a bog, and c) have the drain hole in a spot incompatible with my floor framing. I left wet and frustrated. I ended up just putting down 3 more layers of cloth and resin in order to waterproof the existing cracked fiberglass pan. Looks ugly, but it is now indestructible!

RandyGC said...

I was catching up on some e-mails after being in Ft Wayne this weekend and ran across an alert from one of the local news stations proclaiming an "Ariel Alert".

Flooding must be real bad if we have mermaids coming this far upstream!