Deth

We got pretty decent thunderstorms two days in a row. It’s a nice change of pace from the heat, and the second year in a row now that storms have been pretty lackluster at best.

Yesterday’s storms were well out ahead of tropical storm Elsa, so there was plenty of moisture to work with. Lots of fuel with the slightly higher dew points too. While we didn’t get a direct hit from the one cluster, that one feature lots of lightning. It was pretty constant bomb sounding thunder to our south for a little while. The cell before that which directly affected Mount Joy had decent wind and very heavy rainfall, with some occasionally good thunder and lightning. The rain was the large tropical rain drops instead of the usual small raindrops in thunderstorms. I think I heard some small hail mixed in too, but didn’t notice any hailstones bouncing. There were fairly strong bursts of wind with this storm, but nothing too extreme.

Today’s storm was part of a line of storms that blew up just to our west as they were approaching. This was one of those cool storms where you hear the wind approaching before it gets to you. Haven’t had that in a while. The wind was not severe, but they were not strong gusts that pretty much lasted throughout the duration of the storm. No damage or anything, but it’s nice when it’s just a good gust or two with the out flow before the storm even arrives. There wasn’t as much thunder as yesterday and the rain wasn’t quite as extreme, but it was still heavy blowing rain.

Today’s storm was an enjoyable change of pace from what we’ve been typically having the past few summers, where the outflow outruns the storm. That tends to kill off the storm some if it cools the air out ahead enough. When that happens, the shelf cloud tends to look spectacular, but the storms behind are somewhat lame.

No damage of any kind, and of course, our half rotted tree didn’t lose any limbs in this. It only drops them on nice, sunny, calm days. Soon that will be taken care of.