The Texas Floods Are So Big They Ended the State’s Drought
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Source: Wired
Texas really can’t seem to catch a break. A month ago, the Lone Star state was in the middle of a dry emergency: Its reservoirs were draining, its depleted aquifers were sucking in the earth above. As of Wednesday, though, the state is saturated. Four weeks of dousing storms have swept away property, roads, lives, and prompted governor Greg Abbott to declare 37 counties as disaster areas.
The devastation caused by these floods is heart-wrenching. But you could consider Texas’ weather whiplash to be a good thing: These dousing storms, which seem more and more like the consequence of a strengthening El Niño, have brought an end to a four-year water shortage. Just how much of a silver lining these floods are creating, though, depends on the particular geography of Texas’ different regions—it is a gigantic place, y’all. And the land’s composition also plays a crucial role in just how bad the flooding has gotten.
“Texas is a big state, and there is a big contrast in what happens when rain falls,” says Ronald Kaiser, a water expert at Texas A&M in College Station. There’s no perfect way to slice up the state’s water resources, but broadly, you can think of it in four parts.
East of highway I-35 to the Gulf Coast—crowned by Houston—is low and flat, with dense soils and a shallow clay layer that makes it easy to flood. This is where rain falls hardest, rivers run thickest, and most of the state’s reservoirs are located. “There’s a joke that if it’s overcast in Houston you’ll get flooding,” says Kaiser. Which is why things got so bad so quickly when 10 inches fell on the city Monday night. Talk about a punchline.
From a water supply standpoint, the storms were great for this part of the state. As you can see in the graphic on the left, every reservoir in the eastern part of the state is above 90 percent full (the graphic was updated May 28). But the area also set itself up for more devastating consequences from the rainfall, because during the drought east Texas water districts were pumping groundwater. This leads to so-called subsidence: The ground literally loses elevation as the water is sucked out from under it. Because it’s so low and flat there, even a foot of shrinkage can lead to a lot more standing water. Though subsidence has mostly stabilized in recent years, in the past parts the Houston area were sinking at rates up to three inches a year. Add that to .08 inches of sea level rise a year, and Houston was primed for flood...MORE
Read more: http://www.wired.com/2015/05/texas-floods-big-ended-states-drought/
= new reply since forum marked as read
breaking up is hard to do
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He never once mentioned global warming.
He did however, mention El Niño which is the primary mechanism that's been driving the weather patterns in Texas over the past three weeks.-- which is (I think) what the article is about. 
