"Do You Like Severe Weather?"

The above pre-dawn radar grab is a "storm total" rainfall throughout the greater Triad. While generated purely on estimating algorithms within the Doppler radar, it gives a fair representation of the widespread rainfall the region received Sunday through midnight. Especially heavy were the rains up in the NW mountains along the TN border with Ashe and Watuga Counties.
(click pic to enlarge)

What I don't have images to show you were the overnight storms in the southern Piedmont around the Charlotte region, where massive slow-moving thunderstorm conglomerations produced several warnings, reports of large hail, but most impressively cells which had 4,500 to 5,000 lightning strikes per hour...a light show to beat all light shows.

Needless to say, the radars and our forecasting bodies here at News 14 have been worked a great deal lately. The development and behavior of severe storm cells is oftentimes fascninating, watching outflow boundaries spawn new storms that blow up in 15 minutes, cells converging, cells diverging, cells rotating...there is a mysterious beauty and sacred reverence in watching if not experiencing classic storms...yet we all know they can cause a great deal of damage.

I'm going to give you a really neat link that will take a lot time to play around with...that is, if you like tornados and clicking buttons. The website is a super-data base housing archived tornado data from all over the U.S., and is chock full of data...combined with GoogleEarth 4 (which you can download for free), you can fly the path of the storm. Pretty neat views when you zoom in closer in an area (use scaling tool in the upper left to zoom). As you can see for yourself, there are myriad parameters you can select...have fun playing around with it:

TORNADO PATHS

Luckily, our overnight storms were not rotating here in North Carolina. Stay tuned this week as I will (hopefully) have some neat "art" to show you of my recent dabblings...it won't be tomorrow, but later on this week.