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| A wet back deck and well-watered flowers greeted us at our St. Albans, Vermont home after badly needed dawn thunderstorms rolled through. The dark clouds you see in the background hint at more rain to come today. |
A line of thunderstorms moved into Vermont starting before dawn on the New York/Vermont border, then moving east, giving a lot of us some desperately needed rain.
Rainfall with this line of storms, and a pack of showers right behind it, isn't overwhelming. But it's a start.
We were still mid-rainstorm as I wrote this early this morning here in St. Albans, Vermont, but the line of storms has been dumping between a quarter and a half inch of rain in New York.
I imagine the same will be true in Vermont. Burlington reported 0.3 inches of rain with their early morning thunderstorm, for instance.
It appears we have a good shot at more rain today, and some tomorrow, too. More on that in a minute.
But one interesting thing about this morning's thunderstorms is that some of you might have noticed the thunder seemed louder than usual, or had a deeper boom, or rolled on longer than usual.
The reason was these were a type of feature known as an elevated thunderstorm.
Most thunderstorms originate from warm, humid air right near the surface. Elevated thunderstorms, like those this morning, start from warm, muggy air above the surface, with a thin layer of more stable air near the surface.
The layer of air near the surface that differs from the air a little above ground helps sound waves get trapped near the ground, or get bent back toward earth. This helps amplify the sound of thunder to us on the ground, or makes the sound waves bounce around. That also helps make the thunder louder or roll on for a bit longer than from a usual lightning strike.
OK, so with that out of the way, yes, we do have that shot at additional rain.
This morning's thunder and rain will clear out before noon, at the latest. But another, somewhat stronger weather disturbance is hot on its heels. This patch of showers and storms was in Ontario earlier this morning, and should be here by sometimes this afternoon.
A few of the embedded thunderstorms with the showers this afternoon might be a bit rambunctious, with gusty winds and maybe even some small hail. It doesn't look like there will be anything really severe, though. There could be some locally heavy downpours.
NOAA's Weather Prediction Center has most of Vermont in a low-end marginal risk zone for flash floods today. They're saying there could be multiple rounds of showers and storms to create that risk.
However, as you well know, it's been super dry, so it would take a lot of rain to set off any serious flooding. There will probably be some locally heavy downpours, and you could get some ponding on water on roads and local street flooding if downpours bullseye the downtown of some town or city in Vermont.
Today's rain will definitely cause a lot more good than harm.
A pool of chilly air aloft will move overhead tomorrow, so that means more showers and maybe some rumbles of thunder before it dries out again by Wednesday.
The National Weather Service in South Burlington says by the end of tomorrow, most of Vermont should have received between a half inch and an inch of rain, including what fell early this morning. That's not an incredible amount, and won't erase the drought conditions but it will help.
Note that a few places that get repeated downpours could clock in with a fair amount more than an inch of rain. Those places will probably be rather few and far between, though.
The next chance of rain is Friday night or Saturday. It's too soon to say how much precipitation we get then. But we can only hope for quite a bit more.
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