Floods threaten Texas and Louisiana this week

Louisiana and Texas, including Houston, will get hit with flooding rains for the next few days as a potential tropical storm tries to spin up across the western Gulf.

There is a moderate Level 3 risk of heavy rainfall across coastal Texas for the next three days, the U.S. Weather Prediction Center said. Flood warnings and watches span central and eastern Texas to Mississippi, with up to 7 inches of rain forecast, the National Weather Service said.

“A very impressive setup for flash flooding will begin to unfold along the Gulf Coast of Texas today,” Joe Wegman, a forecaster at the Weather Prediction Center, wrote in an analysis. “The impressive ingredient is the sheer amount of moisture.”

Houston, the fourth most populous U.S. city and home to many refineries and gas processing facilities, is vulnerable to flooding, with Hurricane Harvey triggering devastating impacts in 2017. The flooding rains may drench spectators on their way to Wednesday’s match between Portugal and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Houston.

Along the coast, the moisture is flowing in from a disorganized patch of thunderstorms that may generate the Atlantic hurricane season’s first named storm, the US National Hurricane Center said. The system currently has a 30% chance of becoming Tropical Storm Arthur in the next week.

Elsewhere, as the World Cup group stages continue, there are heat advisories across parts of California, Oregon, Nevada and Washington.