I have a question for you all: all this rain/water that is going north now, isn't it just going to come right back down the Mississippi?
Yes, the water will come back down the Mississippi. However, the river is very deep and wide around the mouth. The river can absorb the flow.
We are so dry in this part of the country. Rain will probably soak in and there will not be a lot of runoff.
One would think so. Some of it would certainly be draining back into Lake Ponchartrain, but the bulk of it seeminly would find its way to the Mississippi. I haven't heard anything about what's happening to water levels in either of those lately.
Depends on the drainage basin. Eastern MS, AL, and east drain to the Gulf east of NO. TN and north of the Smokies will eventually reach the Miss. River, but most of that will take a long time to make it downstream, because of the slow flow rate of rivers and length. Look at a map of MS. and notice how much the river winds like a wet noodle. Might be twice as long as the straight line down that course. Roughly if you draw a line up I-55 to Jackson, then northeast to Columbus, everything to the north and west goes into the Miss. River, but a good bit of that was on the lighter side of the storm. North of Baton Rouge are massive floodgates, that can divert lots of water into the Atchafalaya River, a 20 mile wide swamp to the Gulf far to the west of NOLA. And by the time that much of the water gets down south of Baton Rouge, Lake Pontchartrain will be down and they can divert more water from the river to the lake at the wide spillway west of the NOLA urban area.