Heavy rainfall across the area the past 36 hours has brought some flooding in a few areas of Polk county, storm damage in Pinellas county and much needed drought relief! I have included a screencap of a CoCoRaHS chart for the Tampa Bay area for rainfall in a 24 hour period between 4/6/08 and 4/7/08 at 8am. My gauge recorded 1.18 inches in that period which is the lowest in the region. Several others are in the 2+ inch range, one in far east Hillsborough county got over 4 inches. Click image for full size.

Total rain I observed for the period is 1.59 inches, still among the lowest amounts. Tampa Intl Airport broke a rainfall record with 2.05 inches of rain on 4/6/08, breaking the prev record set in 1933 of 0.69 inches for this date. More info to come, I am at work currently.>

Today was certainly an active weather day for the area! Atmospheric instability resulted in a few severe storms in Eastern locations of Polk county in the afternoon. This was followed up by a squall line ahead of a cold front in the evening hours bringing very high winds to the entire area. I am at work, so no cool pictures or stories to tell. Instead I offer you the local storm reports from the NWS below, most involve high wind speeds.

• 4:53pm - Lake Wales, Polk County: 5 minute duration of dime size hail, and 60mph winds. Hail destroyed shade houses.
• 4:58pm - Lake Wales, Polk County: 1.00 inch hail and 60-70mph wind gusts.
• 5:33pm - Babson Park, Polk County: 0.88 inch hail
• 6:25pm - Cedar Key, Levy County: 57mph wind gust at C-MAN site
• 8:55pm - St Pete (Albert Whitted Apt), Pinellas County: 43mph wind gust at ASOS site.
• 9:05pm - Tampa (MacDill AFB), Hillsborough County: 48mph wind gust at ASOS site.
• 9:12pm - Palmetto (Port Manatee), Manatee County: 41mph wind gust at C-MAN site.

Other observations around the area:

• 8:45pm - 46mph gust observed at Treasure Island CO-OP site (Fire Station, 2 blocks north of me)
• 10:31am - 31mph gust observed at my weather station

My weather station caught a few 29mph gusts around 8:45pm. Unfortunately its current location is in shadow of multi story buildings to the SW, W, NW. The wind was from the West at this time, thus missing the strongest wind gusts.

As of this writing, 0.38in of rain have fallen since 8:45pm (4 hours), rain is still falling.
There were two severe storm warnings today, both issued for Polk county as a result of the above storm reports.

EDIT: Air Pressure dropped like a rock as of 4/6/08 around 1:10am. At its lowest rate, the pressure was dropping at a rate of 0.101 in/hg per hour. This is the fastest pressure drop I have seen in quite some time. It only lasted for about 20 minutes, the pressure quickly rose back up. Not sure what causes this but its pretty interesting!>

Well despite the severe threat we had today, nothing turned severe in our area. Storms seemed to concentrate in the southern half of the area today. Rain concentrated on a line from Fort Myers north to Bradenton and East including numerous inland locations. It appears that rainfall in these areas are similar to yesterday with [read more...]

Today we are in store for some pretty big weather! The storm prediction center in Norman Oklahoma has us under a slight severe storm risk today, and our NWS office in Ruskin agrees, several strong storms with a few severe are definitely possible. The reasoning behind this are for unseasonably cool temperatures aloft (over 18,000 [read more...]

I opened up GRLevel3 today not expecting to see a whole lot as the scope should be relatively clear for the next several days. However I saw in the animated view numerous visible smoke plumes from wild fires. Image below, click for full size. I have highlighted the fire sources with red arrows, and the [read more...]

Well it looks like this winter for the first time in quite a while that I can remember, our precipitation amounts are right on target! Outlined in the table below I have compared my observations of this Winter 2007-2008, last season‘s winter 2006-2007 and compared them to the normal values observed at the closest official [read more...]

Right now, it looks like the Tampa area may get some rain on Friday afternoon from anytime after 2pm through the end of the day. There is a lot of uncertainty to this forecast however. The Storm Prediction Center in Oklahoma says that there is a good potential for severe weather IF sufficient moisture develops [read more...]