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    "headline": "Rachel’s remnants flood Las Vegas as Pacific moisture sets a daily rain record",
    "description": "A former Category 3 hurricane off Mexico dropped about 1.08 inches on Las Vegas on Sunday 11 October, roughly a quarter of the city's normal annual rainfall, closing roads across the valley.",
    "datePublished": "2026-10-13T12:07:00+01:00",
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    "keywords": "flash flooding, Las Vegas, National Weather Service, Nevada, Tropical Storm Rachel",
    "articleBody": "Moisture from the remnants of Tropical Storm Rachel sent water through Las Vegas streets on Sunday 11 October, closing roads across the valley and setting a daily rainfall record. About 1.08 inches fell in a day at the city’s official gauge, roughly a quarter of the 4.2 inches Las Vegas receives in an average year. Floodwater filled storm channels near the Strip, and the storm brought down power lines and left debris on roads. From Mexico’s Pacific coast to the Mojave Rachel formed in the eastern Pacific and strengthened to a Category 3 hurricane off Mexico’s Pacific coast on 1 October. Over the following days it weakened over cooler water, turned north towards Baja California, and was downgraded by the US National Hurricane Center to a post-tropical cyclone. Its leftover circulation crossed Southern California, where some beaches closed because of unusually high water levels, before moving into the desert Southwest. The mechanism is common to most Pacific storms that soak Nevada. Eastern Pacific cyclones usually die at sea, but in autumn a dip in the jet stream off the West Coast often steers their remains north-east. Even after the wind field collapses, the column of warm, humid air survives and is pulled inland on southerly winds. Meteorologists measure this as precipitable water, the depth of rain the atmosphere would produce if all its moisture fell at once, and tropical remnants push it far above normal for the desert. When that air is forced upward by mountains or a passing trough, it produces bursts of heavy rain. Las Vegas is badly placed to absorb it. Desert soils, hard caliche layers and large paved areas shed water almost immediately, and runoff converges on washes and flood channels that can rise in minutes. The same pattern drove flooding in the city when the remnants of Hurricane Hilary crossed the region in August 2023, and in the storms of September that year. Warnings and what comes next The National Weather Service office in Las Vegas issued a flood watch for the valley on 9 October, two days before the heaviest rain, and followed it with flash flood warnings as storms developed on Sunday. A flood watch means conditions favour flooding; a flash flood warning means it is happening or imminent and people in the warned area should move to higher ground. The Clark County flood channels and the tunnels beneath the city are especially dangerous during warnings, and the weather service’s standing advice is never to drive into a flooded road: 12 inches of moving water can float most cars. The moisture did not stop at Nevada. Rachel’s remnant plume spread rain into Utah and higher ground across the interior West, with snow at elevation as it met colder air. Forecasters warned that a flash-flood risk lingered across parts of the Southwest after the main band of rain had passed. The weather service’s next forecast discussions for southern Nevada will show whether a drier westerly flow clears the remaining moisture this week, as is typical in mid-October, when the city averages well under half an inch of rain for the whole month. Further reading Wikipedia: Hurricane Rachel (2026) National Weather Service Las Vegas: October climate book (PDF) Wikipedia: September 2023 southwestern U.S. floods Image: Stan Shebs, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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