Thunderstorms & Tropical Weather

So I think most people know one of the main reasons I live here is because I love thunderstorms. The louder and brighter the better. Well this year after a really bad drought we had quite an active season. It started late this year though. My parents came out in late May and stayed into June. I thought for sure they would get to enjoy some of the storms but they didn't really pick up until late June this year. Once they started though we had some good ones.

Here is a light show from June. We were getting a couple strikes per minute for over an hour that night.

A really fast building storm in June. I love watching the storms build up here. They just pop up out of nowhere.

Recording Adri during a thunderstorm. She would get all excited every time she hears the lightning and start yelling "lightning"

Playing inside the house during a t-storm. Too stormy to go outside.

We also had two decent sized tornadoes here this summer. It's very rare for us to get anything other than an EF0 or EF1 this far south but we had a tornado hit 5 miles to my southeast and then a month or two later one hit a couple miles to my south. I was in the yard when the first one hit and I was watching the lightning and the black clouds thinking it's time to get inside. When I got inside there was a tornado warning on my phone. The second one happened at night. I was in bed and I heard the wind really picking up hard. I knew we were under tornado watch so I turned on the news and got my phone and found out there was an EF2 tornado in the Plantation/Sunrise area. The warnings said to take cover now because once you see it it's too late. I have never heard those kind of warnings here so I took it serious. Luckily no one was killed in either tornado. They aren't monsters like in the Midwest but they were unusually large for S. Florida.

Here is the tornado that struck to the East of us.

In August we had a close call when Hurricane Irene brushed us from 200 miles out and headed north after slamming the Bahamas.

Here is a video of some really heavy rain we got one afternoon in September. 4 inches of rain in one hour. You can see it blowing sideways. At one point it was blowing onto my roof and then up and away. It was a fun storm.

Then at the end of the wet season we really got soaked. When I was in So Cal for my birthday the whole state got drenched. I got back to work at Homestead and some of the buildings had flooded. Then a couple weeks later right before Halloween we had Hurricane Rina. Hurricane Rina was heading for Florida but it stalled out. Well at the same time there was another disturbance in the Atlantic and a low passing from the north and the three of those combined really brought in the rain. We got 15 inches of rain in a single weekend.  People that have lived here for 20 years say they have never seen flooding like that, not even during Wilma. My pool had overflowed, my yard was saturated and had puddles everywhere, the streets were flooded, and the canals were backed up.

A couple days into the heavy rain we went to the Sawgrass Mills Mall thinking that the rain was done. There were palm trees that were surrounded by 2 feet of water. The sides of the freeways looked like rivers and lakes. It was quite a site. Well after a couple hours of shopping we came out to torrential rain. We got home and found out that another 4 inches of rain had fallen at our house. But that was after we actually found a way home. The canals were so backed up that the drains weren't working. The canal was up to the street on Coral Springs Dr and all the streets in my neighborhood were under water. I had to take the back way to my house and even then I had to drive through almost a foot of water to get to my house. The side of my house still has not recovered from the soaking it got. I'm going to have to put up gutters to prepare for next time because between my neighbor and I not having gutters the space in between took on several feet of water coming off the roof.

This is the canal the morning before we got 4 inches of rain. The day we went to the mall. It's already a good 4 feet higher than normal. You can see it coming up on the grass already. I'm not sure exactly how high it peaked but it had to have been pretty high to back up all the storm drains.

Here is my street flooded in mid summer. In flooded even worse in October.

After a disappointing wet season last year I would say this year was pretty good. I enjoyed all the storms and they last late in the season. We were getting daily rain up til last week. I'm glad it has finally stopped though and we can enjoy the sun and some cooler drier weather until May 2012.