7 p.m.
As of 5 p.m., official rainfall amounts in the area seem a bit less than I was expecting: .85 inch at Roanoke, 1.01 inch at Blacksburg, 1.2 inch at Lynchburg.
I don't have a rain gauge at my south Roanoke County apartment, but I'm pretty sure we got more than an inch of rain there, if not close to 2 inches. I included a photo of what was a bone-dry creek branch that swelled with muddy water and debris after heavy thunderstorms this morning.
Well, this round of needed spring rain is just about over. We might get a few showers in the mountains off and on through Tuesday, when a strong cold front could touch off some more thunderstorms. After that front, we could have some of our coldest weather in weeks, maybe even some frost-and-freeze temperatures at midweek.
In the muggy air that set up this rain, new records were set Friday at Roanoke and Blacksburg for the warmest low temperatures on record for the date. Blacksburg only made it down to 55, eclipsing the old mark of 54 in 1962; Roanoke tied its warmest low for the date of 62 set in 1956.
If the low and cold front that triggered this rain had moved in during a partly cloud afternoon with lots of heating, we probably would have had a substantial severe weather outbreak. Weather balloon data from Friday night showed strong winds changing with height in the layers of the atmosphere high above Southwest Virginia. That could have given developing storms enough spin to produce some large hail, high winds and maybe even tornadoes had the heating been sufficient to poke the storms upward enough to have encountered that spinning air.
But with the day's heating gone, there wasn't much energy for the storms to build on. Still, just on the momentum of how they had built in Tennessee and Alabama on Friday night, the storms marched through loud and proud with lots of lightning and heavy rain this morning.
I also included a shot of a neat cloud formation on a small shower north of Roanoke this evening, as seen from the Roanoke Times roof garden. Looks a bit like a wall cloud, or a rotating lowering on a thunderstorm, but it's probably just an updraft base on this developing shower.
Comments
[April 22, 2006 11:09 PM]
Kevin Myatt : →http://blogs.roanoke.com/weatherjournal/[April 23, 2006 8:59 PM]
Brandon Riesenbeck