Spring Storms: 340K Lightning Strikes and 1300 Reports
However you count it, yesterday's severe weather outbreak will probably go down in the record books. Over 1,300 severe storm spotter reports were filed, so many they wouldn't even fit in the NOAA Google Reports map, and more than any time in (at least) the last 10 years.* Here's a look at the wind damage reports alone:
Winds were as high as 82 mph in Braxton, Virginia, and knocked out power to half a million customers in parts of Georgia and North Carolina alone. Hail to 3 inches in diameter was measured in Dubuque, Iowa, and over 40 tornado / funnel cloud / waterspout reports were filed under 26 Tornado Warnings.
626 Severe Thunderstorm Warnings were issued. Over 340,000 lightning strikes hit the Earth in the eastern United States during the storms (data from Vaisala).
Here's what the squall line snapshot looked like on radar at 4 PM, 10 PM, and 4 AM this morning:
*Of course, the reports increase each year due to population and internet rises, but not this much. The previous record as far as I can tell was 1029 during April 2006, a month which also featured nearly 3,000 reports in the first week of the month! (You can read my blog entries during that time). Yesterday's number will fluctuate for a week or two as more reports come in and duplicate reports are merged. The number of Severe Thunderstorm Warnings (626) comes in under the 700+ issued during the April 7, 2006 outbreak.
UPDATE: An official from the Storm Prediction Center puts the number of filtered reports at 850, which makes it the third most active severe weather day on record, but the most active wind day ever.
Here in Central Pennsylvania, I was greeted with an incredibly low and fast-moving shelf cloud, with some lightning. Below is a video I took of the storm blowing through town (view on YourTube for high-res version with audio, and timelapse).
