"Just over 300..."

Just over 300 LSRs in the Southeast yesterday...more than a boatload.

LSRs are "local storm reports" which are official observations of severe weather and damage sent to the National Weather Service. They're tallied for the US at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, OK, resulting in such products as the "storm reports" for yesterday's atmospheric conflagrations. No one, but no one could have predicted the wide-spread explosion of not only storms but pretty nasty ones, and lots of 'em all at the same time (see radars below). If you click on the map below, it will take you to that webpage and you can scroll down and read more details contained in all the reports. (NOTE: this map is preliminary as more late reports will likely be added today).

You can do the same with the map below put out by the Greenville-Spartanburg NWS office - click on it to go to their interactive map of reports:

I took the following random radar grabs below from home (click to enlarge)...I had on the Blacksburg, VA radar (for the Triad) and backed it out to show the region and red thunderstorm warning boxes picked up by neighboring radars...and even pink boxes for tornado warnings (of which there were others - with a storm overhead, I disconnected the computer for safety's sake).

4:21 PM

Above, while a few storms were getting nasty in the Triad, north and northeast of Raleigh the heavens had opened up with extreme vertical development and myriad fast-forming warnings, stacked up like silver dollar pancakes at IHOP...

4:39 PM

Within less than 20 minutes you could pretty well play connect-the-dots with the warnings and see the storm cells coalescing around the western Piedmont and Foothills...

5:20 PM

Whle there was most definitely some storm damage in parts of the Triad, it was far worse in the Raleigh market over to the coast...and the Charlotte market got hammered as well, having their own tornado warning pass through Mecklenburg County late in the afternoon. As I write this, there is no official tornado report for the pink tornado warning box you see above passing by Raleigh, though viewers sent in pictures of cloud rotations and wall clouds around that area.

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But all is quiet now, and will be. Great weather to clean up and assess damage, and even to make repairs in the next week ahead. The next few days may not be the sunniest...and there is the possibility for isolated showers and storms late Friday...but overall we have 'quiet' weather, with a sunny Memorial Day in the 80s to look forward to.

Time to exhale deeply and breathe a sigh of relief, eh...