What happened to Tropical Storm Barry? Windshear, lack of central convection hurt

Ashley White
The Daily Advertiser

Tropical Storm Barry, billed as a dangerous, drenching hurricane, never had the chance to develop into the threat it could have been to Louisiana because of two main factors: its genesis and northern wind shear.

Barry, which briefly reached hurricane status before making landfall Saturday near Intracoastal Cty, began as a thunderstorm cluster over Kansas, according to Ryan Truchelut, co-founder and chief meteorologist at WeatherTiger. It then moved to the Gulf of Mexico where it developed. Most tropical storms begin off the African Coast, in the Caribbean or in the southern Gulf of Mexico.

“Because these thunderstorms happen in pockets and clusters, you have multiple areas of circulation embedded in this kind of broader area of turning,” Truchelut said. “Throughout the life of the storm, it never consolidated into a single well-organized inner core because there wasn’t really one area of rotation. It was a lot of little swirls pivoting around within the storm.”

While that is how most storms begin, they usually condense to one circulation center. But Barry never did, which prevented a strong eyewall from developing and kept it less organized.

Rainfall totals from Tropical Depression Barry as of Sunday, July 14.

“One circulation center usually wins out over the others in early development,” Truchelut said. “Not normal is for it to continue on to be a hurricane and still have a bunch of different centers rotating around.”

Northern wind shear also impacted Barry. It’s what caused most of the rain and wind to be south of the center of circulation, said Donald Jones, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Lake Charles.

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“With a traditional tropical system, the northeast quadrant has the strongest side with the strongest wind and heaviest rainfall,” he said. “That wasn't the case because it was all being sheared off to the south, which also is why it took a while for the rain to make its way inland.”

The storm’s lack of development, stunted by its inability to become well-organized and the wind shear, is what prevented Louisiana from seeing worse weather conditions.

“Had it had more time or more opportunity to become better organized, we would have expected a stronger hurricane, stronger winds,” Jones said. “That would have certainly resulted in more significant surge and more significant rainfall.”

The streaky bands of rain that came with Tropical Storm Barry are not unusual, Jones said. Typically, tropical systems have banded features that are closer together. As they hit the shore and the system moves north, those bands tend to expand and spread out, which is what happened with Barry Saturday night and Sunday.

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“That’s actually where we see, with a lot of tropical systems, our worst flash flooding is within these bands that are moving over the same areas for hours and hours on end,” Jones said. “That’s what we were fearing and why we were talking about getting 15-20 inches across south central Louisiana. It wasn’t necessarily with the initial wave of rain. It was these banding features that we expected.”

Rain will continue to fall through Monday because of Barry, Jones and Truchelut said. Flash floods could be a risk through Monday. An additional five inches is expected to fall in St. Mary Parish.

“While it is going to end up being sort of an underachiever than what was originally forecasting,” Jones said, “you’re still going to wind up looking at rainfall totals of 8-12 inches down there before it’s all said and done.”

Contact Ashley White at adwhite@theadvertiser.com or on Twitter @AshleyyDi