Another round of heavy showers and thunderstorms was expected to hit the US Southwest on Sunday, adding to days of rain that have forced evacuations, water rescues and multimillion-dollar damage across the region.
The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for much of the Four Corners, the meeting point of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. The warning covers a wide area that has already absorbed days of heavy precipitation, leaving soil and waterways with little capacity to take in more water.
Local officials have been tracking swollen rivers that surged after rains picked up on Wednesday. They forecast that those waterways would continue to recede over the coming days, but the new storms threaten to slow that recovery and could push levels back up in places that had just begun to ease.
The episode has already disrupted daily life across several communities. Evacuations were ordered as rising water threatened homes, and crews carried out water rescues to reach residents who were cut off. The damage bill has reached into the millions of dollars, a figure that is likely to grow as officials assess roads, property and infrastructure once the water recedes.
The renewed storm threat is a reminder of how quickly rain can turn into a crisis when rivers rise faster than communities can respond. Flood watches are issued when conditions are favorable for flooding but have not yet produced it, which gives residents a window to prepare, check on neighbors and move to higher ground if needed.
The weather pattern also fits into a broader run of stormy conditions this autumn. In the United Kingdom, an amber weather warning was issued for much of Scotland, parts of Northern Ireland and northern England as Storm Boelo approached, bringing severe gales and heavy rain into Sunday. Forecasters there said wet and very windy conditions would continue into the start of the new week, following the first two named storms of the season. Those forecasts are separate from the US situation, but they show how widely heavy rain and wind are affecting regions this month.
Rain-driven flooding of this kind is one of the clearest local effects of a changing climate, which scientists link to more intense precipitation events in many regions. For the Four Corners, the immediate priority is to keep rivers below dangerous levels while residents and officials prepare for another round of rain.
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