Tuesday, September 25, 2007

No Flying Trees Today, Just Some Needed Rain!



The Storm Prediction Center has placed much of Indiana in a severe weather risk area. Officially we are in a slight risk for severe weather which means 2% to 5% of our area has the potential of receiving damaging wind gusts of 58 mph or greater and/or nickel size hail or larger.

Let me break this down further for you. Even though we are in a severe risk, I am thinking we will not have severe weather here at home. Like in sports, forecasting is all about timing. It looks like the main portion of the cold front that will be sparking showers and thunderstorms today will not move through until after midnight. This means we will have lost our daytime heating keeping the atmosphere more stable. Another thing in our favor is that we have had plenty of clouds around today. This will also help keep things from getting too rough. But be careful of lightning and heavy downpours which will be our main threats tonight.
This is good news because we have not had any severe weather since August 19th and meteorologist do worry about a second severe weather season this time of year due to a much stronger jet stream caused by colliding air masses. Remember here in Lafayette we have had severe weather every month of the year, including tornadoes like we saw in January of 1996. So this graph is just a glimpse of what it means to live in Indiana.




The big story will be our first rain in two weeks on the way today. We are running a good one to two inch rainfall deficit so far this month and some areas could actually double their rainfall between today and tomorrow morning. Yes, we are long, long overdue. Some areas could ring out over an inch of rain easily with all of the available moisture in the atmosphere. I will make sure to keep you update on those rainfall totals and any thunderstorms. Tune in and check back here for more details...I will also post yesterday's impressive weather watcher highs and much more!

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