The upper level disturbance did a good job of triggering widespread showers & heavy thunderstorms Wed. midday. A few trees dropped on homes in & near Ponte Vedra & a 22-yr. old male was struck by lightning but only sustained "minor injuries" on Jax's Westside.
As the disturbance moves away, storms will be more widely scattered Thu. afternoon due to some sinking air (subsidence) on the backside of the disturbance. But where storms occur, they will again be locally very heavy, though the tendency will be for the storms to pop up, become strong then quickly go back down.
Weak troughing (keeping upper level air relatively cool) will persist over the Eastern U.S. Fri. through the weekend into early next week so expect quite a few afternoon/early evening thunderstorms with heavy downpours & lots of lightning. It's a pattern not unusual for this time of yr. but even a little wetter than avg.
"Dolly" roared into S. Texas at midday Wed. as a low-end Cat. 2 hurricane. "Dolly" tightened up quite a bit overnight into early Wed. & if the storm would have had much more time over water, we could have been looking at a Cat. 3 storm. Rainfall from "Dolly" helped set a couple of records in Brownsville:
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BROWNSVILLE TX
0428 PM CDT WED JUL 23 2008
...RECORD DAILY MAXIMUM RAINFALL SET AT BROWNSVILLE...
A RECORD RAINFALL OF 4.91 INCH(ES) WAS SET AT BROWNSVILLE TODAY.
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 2.01 SET IN 1929.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BROWNSVILLE TX
301 PM CDT WED JUL 23 2008
...RECORD MAXIMUM MONTH OF JULY RAINFALL SET AT BROWNSVILLE...
A RECORD RAINFALL OF 10.81 INCHES FOR THE MONTH OF JULY WAS SET AT
BROWNSVILLE TODAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 9.43 INCHES SET IN
1976. *NOTE THAT THIS IS PRELIMINARY DATA AS RAINFALL CONTINUES
ACROSS THE AREA THIS AFTERNOON.*
Now the tropics will turn much quieter. Several tropical waves are in the Atlantic Basin but nothing that's organizing. It would seem maybe 1 or 2 named storms during the next 3-4 weeks before an upturn again in activity (see Tue. July 22 post).
