Lightning strikes blister county
More than 2,500 in two hours caused by lots of atmospheric fireworks.
An unusual summer weather pattern cracked open South Florida’s sky Sunday, spearing Palm Beach County with more than 2,500 lighting strikes in two hours and detonating storms along
pools of rain-cooled air.
Fed from above by sub-freezing temperatures whipped into the state by a plunging jet stream, and gorging on sticky daytime highs that peaked at 94 degrees in West Palm Beach, the rapid-fire storms temporarily cut electricity to as many as 12,000 homes.
“It was like a tropical storm was hitting, it was huge,” said Theo Hayes, who lives near the Intracoastal in West Palm Beach. “The rain got to the point where I couldn’t see Palm Beach Island.
It was weird, but that’s Florida weather.”
Meteorologists with the National Weather Service in Miami said the pattern that emboldened Sunday’s storms will be in place again today with an upper-level area of low pressure over the Gulf of Mexico sending in westerly winds to battle afternoon sea breezes.
Storms similar to Sunday’s focused their ire south on Monday, hitting mostly in Miami-Dade County. But a 70 percent chance of showers is in today’s forecast for West Palm Beach, with another round of widespread thunderstorms possible, according to meteorologists at the South Florida Water Man- agement District.
“I sat there with a glass of beer in one hand and a fifire extinguisher in the other,” West Palm Beach resident Michael Hundley said about Sunday’s thunderstorms.
Hundley had a close call last week when lightning struck a tree near his house. The current traveled through the ground into his kitchen, blowing a hole in the flfloor and in a wall behind a book case.
Contributing to the atmospheric tumult i s a deep summertime dive in the jet stream, which is bent like a horseshoe as it pushes against a “gigantic” Bermuda High spinning offff the eastern seaboard.
“There’s just this big roadblock in the pattern that i s f orc i ng t he j e t s t re a m s o u t h w a r d , ” s a i d D a v e S a muhel, s e n i o r mete o - rologist for AccuWeather. “It’s an unusual set up right now across the eastern U.S. in general.”
The counter- clockwise spin of low pressure and clockwise twist of the Bermuda Hi g h a re work i n g together to pump soggy tropical air into states from the Carolinas to Vermont, with flflash flflood watches in effffffffffffect as far north as New York.
On average, most areas in the Northeast pick up 3- 4 inches of rainfall during the month of July. However, some places in the mid-Atlantic have already received t wo times these amounts during the fifirst three weeks of the month, according to AccuWeather.
Baltimore was hit with 4.79 inches of rain Saturday, breaking the record 2.76 inches recorded for that day in 1887.
Rainfall totals were less impressive for Palm Beach Count y, with t he of f i c i al gauge at Palm Beach International Airport measuring 0.65 inches Sunday and wind gusts as high as 30 mph.
South Florida Water Management District measurements showed 2.29 inches at the Corbett Wildlife Management Area in western Palm Beach County. Jupite r re c orded 1 .47 i nche s Sunday followed by 1.34 in Jupiter Farms, 1.33 in North Palm Beach, 1.30 in Royal Palm Beach, 0.55 in Boynton Beach and 0.60 in Delray Beach.
The district’s “raindar” estimates, which are usually within 20 percent of actual rainfall amounts, show a s mall a re a of West Pal m Beach where as much as 3-4 inches of rain likely fell.
“For 20 minutes it was raining on one side of my house but not the other,” Hayes said. “It was l i ke a river coming down Valencia from Dixie.”
Robert Molleda, the warning coordination meteorologist in Miami, said the 2,500 lightning strikes between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. Sunday was impressive.
“I would say cer t ainly, that’s a lot and a lot more than your average thunderstorm day,” Molleda said.
Instead of a line of thunderstorms such as what Florida sees when a cold front sweeps through, Molleda said clusters of storms were forming over land sending out rushes of rain-cooled air called gust fronts or outflflow boundaries. Those fronts can produce strong winds and bir th new storms as they collide with boundaries from other storms or smack into a sea breeze.
“When the air converges at the surface it is forced to rise straight up,” Samuhel said. “The air is just rising like crazy and the storms can be explosive.”
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