Category: Weather

We managed to sleep through a tornado that touched down just a few miles from us around 1:30 AM. No damage here (the basil plant sitting on the grill didn’t even get blown over), but there were numerous reports of downed trees and power outages when we woke up around 2:30 AM for unrelated reasons. Haven’t heard any reports of injuries or deaths, which is good.

Every thing here at the house is ok. Not even any branches blown out of the trees.

The 2015 storm season got off to an early start a couple of days ago with Ana, which started off as a subtropical system and got upgraded to a tropical storm yesterday.

It skirted by Charleston making things breezy with occasional rain the last couple of days. Ana made landfall around Myrtle Beach this morning.

According to my blogmemory, the last time a storm popped up this early was back in 2007 with TS Andrea. That year ended up being a kind of busy-ish but uneventful storm season.

Hopefully this year will be similar.

Last night and for a good part of today, many states in the southeast were treated to what the Weather Channel was calling “Winter Storm Leon”. The Charleston area got socked with temperatures that fell to a little below 0°C during the evening and stayed there overnight. Combined with the rain that moved in, much of the area ended up with a nice coating of ice and sleet. It was bad enough that the Weather Channel sent Jim Cantore to Charleston to report on the storm.

This morning I woke up to this outside the front door.

This is what the back yard looked like.

Most of what fell was sleet, but there was the occasional snowflake that came down. It’s been a long time since i heard the pinging of sleet off windows.

Temperatures didn’t get much above freezing today, so there was only some token melting of the ice. What did melt today will probably turn into ice overnight.

Hopefully things will warm up enough to melt the ice away tomorrow.

Looks like we’ll be in store for a rainy and windy weekendand start to next week thanks to Tropical Storm Chantal. As of today’s 8PM update, this is what the forecast track looks like.

As long as the weather is good for the 19th, I’ll be happy.

It’s been unusually wet and rainy so far this year, a sharp contrast to the drought/near-drought conditions we’ve been having for the past few years.

Yesterday a particularly persistent and strong storm triggered several severe thundrestorm alerts and tornado warnings. Got some pretty torrential rains at the house that went on for around 3 hours, long enough to get some serious water running through the ditch beside the house and turn part of the back yard into a small river.

The tornado warnings were close enough that we spent part of the storm hunkered down in one of our little closets. The official rainfall amount was only a little over 1 cm yesterday, but there was definitely way more than that over James Island and Johns Island. I saw some reports saying there was close to 10 cm of rain in my area.

I hope the rest of the summer isn’t going to be quite this rainy.