Sand Bars on the Wabash Soaked As Arabella leaves its Mark

Well it looks like folks will not be begging me for rain at the grocery store for awhile. No, this really didn't bother me but it will be nice to talk about different things such as how much snow we will receive this winter and if I really stay awake all night on the weather blog with the all the WLFI bloggers when it snows! You bet! Here are some preliminary rainfall totals as of 11 p.m. Tuesday night. I will have the final tally posted above by this evening. I was certainly running around the station very excited last night like I do during snowstorms and could have used some tennis shoes. My dress shoes could not keep up with me. I was pumped up because it was our heaviest rain since the remnants of Ike hit the area back on September 14th. We really needed the rain as evidenced by the sand bars that were becoming more like islands on the Wabash River you see below courtesy of the WLFI Renaissance Cam. This shot was taken yesterday afternoon. Beach towel anyone?


The impressive part of the rain was that most of it occurred in about a 5 hour time frame once it started up after 2 p.m. The Sagamore Parkway turned into a river like it normally does during a heavy rain event with huge puddles. I snapped a quick shot below for you.

This may not have been the actual remnants of a tropical storm that passed overhead but Arabella as we called it really held its own. If this had been snow which it probably would not have been in the winter due to its western storm track we would have had a nice swath of 6 to 10 inches of snow. It is a reminder that we will start watching these storm tracks more closely as we head through the autumn season because they are many times repeated in the winter season. I do think our warm October so far is a sign of a much milder winter than last year and we are already 5 days past our normal first widespread frost. I am not by any means canceling winter but it is just something to think about. It is amazing our company Christmas party is only 67 days away as I was reminded in an e-mail and one thing I do like is our chances for a White Christmas. I will have more on this here on the blog this week as to why. In the meantime, here is a cool compare and contrast between the remnants of Ike and our first autumn storm of the season Ara.

The first column is how much rain each produced at WLFI and really it is a "wash" with a big asterisk. We all remember some of those areas in our far northern viewing area that saw an incredible 3 to 6 inches of rain with isolated amounts of 8 inches near Demotte. This time around no major flooding or flooding on the rivers just the way we like it! The second column shows the wind gusts with the advantage clearly going to Ike and the third column explains why. You can see the lowest pressures created by both storms in that last column and the very low 29.21" certainly caused more of an imbalance in the atmosphere forcing the wind to blow faster into the center of what was once hurricane Ike bringing the higher wind gusts.

One thing both Ike and Ara had was they both had a tropical connection. Although in Arabella's case in a totally different way. Check out the cool connection between Marco and Ara teaming up on the satellite pictures with Marco holding hands and handing off plenty of moisture to Ara and much of the Midwest. Yesterday, the National Hurricane Center named an organized area of thunderstorms, Tropical Storm Marco before it quickly moved into Mexico. It was probably one of the shortest-lived and smallest tropical storms on record which was about the size of Delaware. You can barely make it out on the satellite picture above. It is a good thing I highlighted it. This is in stark contrast to Ike which was one of the biggest tropical systems on record. Speaking of impressive you can really trace Arabella's train of moisture all the way from Marco and the Gulf of Mexico on the graphic above and this one-two punch helped a rich feed of moisture into our area giving our galoshes a good workout.

Now without further adieu. Your weather song of the day. It should be of no surprise since I talked about the Eurythmics yesterday.Check in with Weather Team 18 tonight and we will tell you when our 2nd big autumn storm will arrive. We do need a male "B" name so start sending in requests. The good news and hint to the forecast is that we will not have to name anymore storms until AFTER COLUMBUS DAY! Now go make it a great day.