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Severe thunderstorm/derecho/flooding threat

A severe thunderstorm watch is in effect over Indiana into the afternoon.  Training thunderstorms have dumped several inches in spots, while other areas have gotten little rain.  Parts of Brown County, Indiana have gotten 7 inches of rain thus far.

Heavy thunderstorms are ongoing, especially in southeast Indiana, and these storms are likely to continue.  Lack of appreciable movement is leading to tremendous rainfall totals and flooding in isolated areas.  Other areas, such as my personal rain gauge in western hills, have gotten less than a tenth of an inch.

A line of severe storms has formed in Illinois and is moving eastward as a large bow echo.  This complex is expected to continue and may form into a derecho as the morning goes on.  Such a storm complex could be quite damaging as the day goes on if and where it holds together.

Bow echo information:  click here

Derecho definition:  click here

More about derechos:  click here

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Wet here, dry there: an important lesson

Monday, I was amazed to find out just how spotty recent rains have been.  Just a few miles from my over-worked rain gauge I found a dry landscape and a tree which needed water.

Particularly heavy rain passed over my location recently, resulting in the following very impressive but hardly representative rainfall totals:

3 day rainfall last week: 3.28
July rainfall: 6.94
June-July total: 12.17

Monday, I looked at a tree in Cleves, OH, just a few miles west of my location.  I had to dig some dirt away from the base of this relatively young Kousa dogwood.  It had been planted a little too deep.

The soil was bone dry down to several inches.  I had seen a couple CoCoRaHS rainfall reports near Cleves which were substantially lower than at my house.  Apparently Cleves missed much of the recent rain.  I can confirm that much of the heavy rainfall I received was from small cells which did not cover a large area.

The take home message:  You cannot rely on the rainfall at the airport or at other reporting stations to determine how much rain fell in your yard.  You must have a rain gauge and keep track of what falls in your yard.  Click here to find Arbor Doctor’s rain gauge selection.