“Don is dead. The cyclone literally evaporated over Texas about as fast as I have ever seen without mountains involved.”

That pronouncement from Forecaster Blake of the National Hurricane Center in the last advisory on Tropical Storm Don summed up the impact of the weather system on the South Texas coast when it made landfall late on July 29 after having been downgraded to a tropical depression.

A parched South Texas looked to Don to bring significant, if not drought-ending, rain to a state that has suffered from severe drought since Oct. 2010. It didn’t.

While forecasters initially thought Don could bring as much as seven inches of precipitation to parts of rain-starved Texas, the NHC said the system brought only a “meager” amount of rain as it moved inland.

The region where Don made landfall, 40 miles south of Corpus Christi, Texas, is sparsely populated. Following landfall, there have been few reports of damage, according to catastrophe modeler AIR Worldwide.

“Earlier in the week, as Don moved relatively quickly across the southern Gulf of Mexico towards Texas, it changed little in intensity, inhibited by the area of moderate vertical wind shear through which it was passing,” said Dr. Tim Doggett, principal scientist at AIR Worldwide. “Though it tracked near several areas where offshore oil production is conducted, it avoided the largest concentrations of production platforms, which lie south of New Orleans. Hence, no damage to offshore rigs was reported from Don in the Gulf.”

Source: AIR Worldwide, National Hurricane Center