As Tropical Storm Hilary caused severe floods and mudflows throughout Southern California, extreme meteorologist Dr. Reed Timmer was on the ground. He talks with AccuWeather about the experience of this storm.
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00:00 Okay, extreme meteorologist, Dr. Reed Timmer,
00:02 was out chasing Hillary this weekend,
00:04 big surprise, right, in Southern California,
00:07 and joins us now to discuss the chase.
00:10 Reed, hurricanes can always produce
00:12 a lot of avenues to chase.
00:13 Sunday, you were out early in the day
00:15 chasing tornado-warm storms, right?
00:17 - That's right, and just like the other tropical systems
00:21 that I chased in the eastern U.S. and in the Gulf Coast,
00:24 you didn't only have the damaging winds
00:26 from the cyclone itself,
00:27 but you had the outer bands that were producing tornadoes,
00:30 and we were chasing some supercell storms
00:32 very close to the Salton Sea,
00:33 and they were rotating dramatically.
00:35 They had a wall cloud as well,
00:37 and you could visibly see that intense rotation.
00:39 They were just like supercells,
00:41 except they were moving east to west,
00:42 and that wall cloud was located
00:44 on the east side of the storm,
00:45 pulling in the inflow from the northeast.
00:47 You could see one of those wall clouds right there
00:49 in Riverside County,
00:51 and that actually produced some flash floods as well
00:53 that were flowing in to the Salton Sea from the north,
00:56 and nearly trapped us down to the Salton Sea area.
00:59 Our main target was actually the debris flows
01:01 and the flash flood potential off the southern slopes
01:04 and eastern slopes of the San Bernardino Mountains,
01:06 and that's because some of those higher peaks
01:08 up near 12,000 feet were forecast
01:10 to receive the brunt of the rainfall.
01:12 That's exactly what happened
01:13 with nearly 15 inches of rainfall
01:15 measured there above Whitewater River.
01:17 - You got it shifting into flood mode.
01:20 You watch some of those basins and washes in the deserts.
01:23 That's some pretty dangerous stuff,
01:24 and you say that you think your safety
01:26 may have been at risk at one point.
01:28 You were a little bit worried.
01:29 - I was a little bit worried,
01:32 but that's because we don't wanna get in a rough position
01:34 as a storm chaser or a meteorologist out there.
01:37 Our job is to report on those flash floods,
01:39 and I definitely have been doing this for a long time,
01:42 chasing these debris flows,
01:43 and you have to stay outside of the wash.
01:45 You always have to be looking upstream,
01:47 because a lot of times,
01:48 these floods will come in multiple surges.
01:50 You have the initial debris plug.
01:52 There's a lot of trees and boulders,
01:53 especially those floods that come off
01:55 the wildfire burn scars like this one,
01:57 and you can see that giant boulder
01:59 about the size of a dump truck there
02:01 just rolling down that flash flood,
02:03 being pushed by a cottonwood tree,
02:05 and you can also see a lot of those trees are charred too,
02:07 so that's because that came from the apple fire burn scar
02:10 up above Whitewater,
02:12 and those are the most dangerous debris flows.
02:14 They move a lot more rapidly.
02:15 They have a lot of debris in them,
02:16 and this flow continued to increase in size overnight
02:20 and peaked at about 20,000 cubic feet per second,
02:23 and it's that flood that ended up rippling Interstate 10
02:26 and trapping motorists out there
02:28 near the Palm Springs area.
02:30 - You got it.
02:31 There was so much devastation out there
02:32 with all kinds of flooding.
02:34 Extreme meteorologist Dr. Reid Timmer,
02:36 thank you for that report.