As if right on queue, it would appear our afternoon thunderstorm pattern has begun at the start of hurricane season and the start of Florida‘s rainy season. The storm development pattern is quite typical of Florida storms as well, sticking mainly to areas where boundary interaction is occuring.

For example, on May 31 with a ESE wind flow, the Atlantic and Gulf seabreezes collided just to the East of the I-75 corridor creating several strong storms, sporadic hail reports and even a funnel cloud sighting near Punta Gorda. These storms all diminished by 11pm.

Today was thunderstorm ping pong all across the I-75 corridor, the storms began along seabreeze collisions almost like a textbook example by starting over Pinellas Park and Oldsmar where the boundary collisions occur first typically around 11am to 1pm, then moving into the inland locations like areas from Bradenton south through Fort Meyers, and again from the Wesley Chapel area north through Inverness. Then the seabreeze stopped being responsible for new storm development and the outflow boundaries took over, hence my ping pong statement. Most of these storms created outflows which created more storms as those outflows collided and this pattern has continued all day bouncing all around the area. Storms today have generally stayed confined to the sea breeze collision areas which would be areas east of I-75 and the other hot areas over Pinellas Park and Oldsmar. You could say today was a perfect example of how boundary collisions work.

Unfortunately nearly all coastal locations have received no rainfall in the last two days. This can be attributed to weak wind flow from the ESE failing to overtake the Gulf seabreeze close enough to the shore.

However I do have one very interesting screenshot. This was taken using GRLevel3 today of a storm over SR-52 and I-75 near San Antonio. Here is a strong storm cell that had been sitting nearly stationary on this location and according to the USPLN lightning detection network, 661 lightning strikes had occurred in this 2.2 square mile grid in the last 60 minutes. Crazy!

June 1 marks the beginning of the Atlantic Hurricane Season and already we can mark Authur off the list. This storm hardly lasted 24 hours striking Central America bringing little more than a heavy rain event to the area.

Florida looks to be in the clear for the next week at least as there does not appear to be any tropical systems developing on any models that would affect Florida in an adverse way. This is counter to the last two years where a tropical system impacted the Gulf coast of Florida within the first 10 days of the season (Alberto, striking near Tallahassee as a Tropical Storm in 2006; Barry, striking St. Petersburg as a Tropical Storm in 2007). Funny as I was secretly hoping for a tropical system to impact us as well, bring some excitement to Florida.

The year is forecast to be an average to slightly above average year for Hurricanes as well, similar to forecasts the past several years.

Finally some rain! While not much, I‘d say we will take anything we can get at this point. 34 days have elapsed since our last measurable rainfall on April 13th and 41 days have elapsed since our last significant rainfall on April 6th. I will keep counting the days till the next significant rainfall as [read more...]

May 10 marks day number 26 without any measurable precipitation with my weather station here in Treasure Island. The last measurable precipitation was on April 13th, and it was for a minor 0.04 inches of rain. If you factor in April 13th, that means we have gone 33 days with less than 1/20th of an [read more...]

This is a copy/paste taken from tbo.com earlier today. Apparently a Pelican nose dived into a swimmer in Treasure Island puncturing her cheek and required 25 stitches! TAMPA - Maybe she‘d get stung by a jellyfish. Maybe she‘d be attacked by a shark. Debbie Shoemaker kept those scenarios in the back of her mind Thursday [read more...]

Well it appears the last of our rain for April has come and gone. Monday the 28th brought some light to moderate showers for our area with some locations receiving about half an inch. Here in Treasure Island however, we received zero. Thats right, nothing. Radar indicated a bit of light rain in the area [read more...]