Here's a map of the precipitation that was falling in the lower Mississippi River watershed yesterday afternoon. The heaviest storms in Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana are all in the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Ohio River drainages. Over in Missouri there's some not-so-heavy rain falling in the Merrimack and Missouri River basins. All that water will, at least in theory, flow by Memphis eventually. (The precipitation in Arkansas and southern Missouri will reach the Mississippi downstream of Memphis.)
And yet, though it looks like a lot of rain, it's created only a small bump in the river stage forecast at Memphis. Right now the river is about a foot below zero on the Memphis gauge, and that bump is still below zero. To produce a significant rise in the Mississippi here, we need to have quite a few days when the weather map looks like the one above. That certainly could happen, but if it doesn't, we could be seeing never-before-recorded low water levels by the late summer and fall.
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