According to yesterday’s RKK evening news, the heavy rain has been caused by “back-building” systems that dump large amounts of rain in one area without seeming to move much. Here’s an explanation from Wikipedia:
“A back-building thunderstorm, commonly referred to as a training thunderstorm, is a thunderstorm in which new development takes place on the upwind side (usually the west or southwest side in the Northern Hemisphere), such that the storm seems to remain stationary or propagate in a backward direction. Though the storm often appears stationary on radar, or even moving upwind, this is an illusion. The storm is really a multi-cell storm with new, more vigorous cells that form on the upwind side, replacing older cells that continue to drift downwind. When this happens, catastrophic flooding is possible.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderstorm#Back-building_thunderstorm
The image was taken from an academic paper on the topic:
http://www2.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/workshops/WS2006/abstracts/Session02/2_4_Schumacher.pdf
– Kirk