Intense Pulse Storm, Much needed rainfall

If you have read previous posts, I mentioned about a chance of showers and thunderstorms on Sunday. Well the mechanism and moisture behind the storms last night has moved southeast so I do not think we will see much at all today. It also remains to be seen what exactly happens when the next cold front swings through Monday night. This is the cold front that appears to drop us back down to normal temperatures during the week. Behind Saturday nights system, some drier air will be working in and this will have to be overcome tomorrow for us to see storms in the evening. More on this later..

If you were in Apex, southeastern Cary, and southwestern Raleigh yesterday between 5 and 7, then you were under an intense pulse severe thunderstorm. Around 5pm, isolated thunderstorms developed from Sanford to Apex. They were very slow movers and each storms outflow interacted with each other to form a bigger storm that became severe for a short time. Here is a radar grab from Gibson Ridge Level 2 Analyst Edition software taken at 5:42pm. This is during the time when Apex was getting hit with penny size hail (.75 inch diameter) and lots of lightning and strong winds (40-50mph). The storm then moved right over my house(southeastern Cary) bringing with it torrential rains, 40-50 mph winds, and intense cloud to ground lightning. I would have to estimate that .50 - .75 inches of rain fell in 15 minutes. The storm then moved east over southern Raleigh and then into Johnston County. Other severe storms occured last night as well in other parts of central and eastern NC.



Around midnight Sunday, new activity began to move back into the area. This was certainly less severe then activity earlier in the evening but if you lived in places like Lillington, Sanford, Southern Pines, and Fayetteville, you would have gotten your fair share of lightning and heavy rain. For us in Wake County, we had whats called stratiform rainfall. This rainfall was associated with the back side of a squall line of thunderstorms to our south and east. There was an occasional lightning strike also around 2 am. This rainfall however was beneficial however for adding to the totals already received earlier. Here is a snippet from this mornings area forecast discussion from the National Weather Service Forecast Discussion in Raleigh. " 2.5 to 3.5 inches were reported across the sandhills region... including Lee...Harnett and Cumberland counties...with the highest 24 hour total coming from a cocorahs report in Lillington of 5.0 inches!" Below is a summary of rainfall from 8am Saturday to 8am Sunday in Wake County..

Apex 2.1w 1.74"
Holly Springs 1.8sw 1.60"
Cary 0.4nnw 1.36"
Raleigh 2.2n 1.17"
Knightdale 2.6ssw 0.78"
Garner 5.6s 0.36"
rdu Airport (krdu) 0.25"