FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla. – Wait a minute, isn’t Florida supposed to be the “Sunshine State?” Perhaps not in South Florida this season …
Welcome to our new weekly feature, “Weekend Weather Wows,” where we’ll go back and find the most interesting tidbits of weather you might have missed over the past week, so you’ll be ready to impress at the water cooler (or virtual water cooler) come Monday.
Usually, this column will only go back over the previous week’s weather tidbits, but I was off week-before-last spending some in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, area for spring break and … yes, exquisite timing as it rained nearly the whole week.
Although “rain” is a decent understatement. So is “poured.” And “drenched” and … well, just find an adjective you like here.
As you may have heard, thunderstorms just parked over the town, delivering rain measured in feet instead of inches and causing widespread flooding. But how much rain fell amazes me to this day, especially when you consider it wasn’t at the hand of a hurricane or tropical storm. Just stubborn thunderstorms.
Fort Lauderdale’s official rain gauge at the airport was already having issues before the big storm, but then the area around the weather station flooded, according to the National Weather Service so we may have lost the official measurement. However, a nearby rain gauge provided by WeatherSTEM did function through the event and recorded incredible rainfall accumulations!
The area received 20.42 inches in one day (April 13) and 26.97 inches over a two-day period. Some of the rainfall rates recorded were 0.18 inches per minute which works out to about 0.01 inches of rain every 3 seconds! A town in the Atacama Desert in Chile once went 17 years without even that little morsel of rain.
It’s possible enough of that fell over a 24-hour period to set the Florida state record for 24-hour rainfall at 23.28 inches, but it’ll be up to NOAA’s State Climate Extremes Committee to accept whether this gauge’s measurements from the storm conform to the high standards of official data.
But the storms kept coming. Fort Lauderdale is now up to just under 35 inches of rain since April 9. That’s more rain than Seattle saw in all of 2019!
And no, I didn’t bring the rain with me from Seattle. Some quick calculations show it’d take over 630,000 Boeing 747 cargo jets to deliver 30 inches of rain to all of Fort Lauderdale. If I get the first 50 pounds “free” that’s only about, oh, $6.2 billion in overweight luggage fees. So sorry Florida, your rain is home-grown. Besides, it’s still raining out here…
Breaking news: It snowed in Minnesota this winter. While parts of the Northeast were nearly shutout of winter fun, several towns in Minnesota had among their Top 5 snowiest winters.
But in Duluth, it’s now THE snowiest winter. Snow this week has pushed their winter snowfall this season to 138.3 inches of snow, breaking their old record by 3.1 inches set in 1995-96. You know, Florida once went 17 years in a row without 138.3 inches of snow….
Minneapolis sits in third place this year for their snowiest winter.
We’ve highlighted the power of rain and snow; how about the power of five suns?!? A poor tree in the Green Bay area knows the feeling.
Severe thunderstorms rolled across much of the Midwest last week, with one potent thunderstorm taking out its wrath on this tree in Hobart, Wisconsin.
Did you know lightning bolts can reach temperatures of 50,000 degrees? That’s about five times hotter than the surface of the sun, according to the National Weather Service (though the core of the sun is considerably hotter)… or only about 2.3 times the heat the Packers are getting over the whole Aaron Rodgers trade drama.
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If the tree is wet, the water inside the bark will instantly boil and explode, creating the incredible pressure that leads to the explosion.
Japan’s Himawari 9 weather satellite patrolling the western Pacific Ocean witnessed two rare events in congruence on Thursday afternoon — a tropical storm that sat right in the path of a solar eclipse.
Tropical Storm Sanvu briefly reached 50 mph as peak speed as it churned in the Pacific but was fizzling this weekend.
We’ll finish up with some cloud eye candy — first this ominous supercell thunderstorm that came right to the doorstep of those tasked with tracking their developments. That building in the foreground is NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.
Some of the forecasters there wrote about the impending storms– then went out and verified their forecast in real time!
Then ominous mammatus clouds turned a gloomy rain-delayed start to the Chicago Cubs game Thursday night against Los Angeles into the ballpark sunset of the year so far.
The gloom would return when the Cubs bullpen gave up a grand slam to lose the game in the 8th, but skies were brighter literally and figuratively the next day when they nearly pitched a perfect game in their 13-0 revenge thumping of the Dodgers Friday on a much sunnier afternoon.