Puerto Rico Creates Its Own Weather

*UPDATE: Thanks for the notes that Puerto Rico is not a "political state" - even though I was talking about meteorology, where the U.S. is generally considered to have 51 states, I should have said "territory."

I was tooling around on AccuWeather.com MapSpace™ this afternoon and was intrigued by this RadSat image of Puerto Rico showing a cloud approximately the same size as the island.

This reminded me how the island

creates its own weather. Sea-breezes frequently cause thunderstorms which gain moisture by moving up the (considerable) mountains there. As this article by Jeff Haby points out, Puerto Rico is the most flash-flood-prone state in the nation.

PUERTO RICO, AS VIEWED FROM THE EAST (GOOGLE EARTH)
Other problems forecasting there include two points - one, computer models often can't resolve the small (mesoscale) meteorological processes such as the sea-breeze and are hence not very useful there. And two, their radar's elevation of over 3000 feet also masks what's really happening on the ground (the beam can go up, but not down).

In fact, there were flood warnings out as I looked at this storm:

September is one of the rainiest months, with over 14 inches not uncommon in the western part of the state.

Here's a look at some of our other MapSpace products from this storm:

HIGH-RES RADAR

ENHANCED INFRARED SAT