Local drought in Florida? Anyone else DRY?

[larixmtn]

I live about 12 miles southwest of Gainesville, FL (just west of Payne's Prairie) and have experienced a very strange weather phenomenon. All summer long, storms form all around us in every direction, but a small area, perhaps 2-3 miles in diameter around my house, receives sprinkles or nothing. This happens even with different mechanisms (sea breezes, fronts etc.) and huge storms will develop and move toward us from the south, east, west and (in today's case) north but somehow we miss out. It has happened at least 40 times this summer. The same pattern occurred, but to a lesser extent, the last 3 summers. Just a few miles away the ditches are full of water and my property is parched, with plants wilting and showing signs of drought stress. Anyone else experience this or have any ideas as to the cause?

[wi_fl_wx]

I live about 12 miles southwest of Gainesville, FL (just west of Payne's Prairie) and have experienced a very strange weather phenomenon. All summer long, storms form all around us in every direction, but a small area, perhaps 2-3 miles in diameter around my house, receives sprinkles or nothing. This happens even with different mechanisms (sea breezes, fronts etc.) and huge storms will develop and move toward us from the south, east, west and (in today's case) north but somehow we miss out. It has happened at least 40 times this summer. The same pattern occurred, but to a lesser extent, the last 3 summers. Just a few miles away the ditches are full of water and my property is parched, with plants wilting and showing signs of drought stress. Anyone else experience this or have any ideas as to the cause?

The drought cycle seems to have a positive feedback, especially on the mesoscale. Dry areas will have lower surface dew points than areas that have received rain, which prevents future convection from forming or weakens nearby convection. But I would expect to see that kind of impact only on storms with marginal moisture/instability conditions, such as airmass thunderstorms or weak seabreeze convection. We saw what happened to TS Don when it approached Texas, but that required a large area of dry/stable air.

But an area of 2-3 miles? That seems like too small of an area to see any influence, except for maybe the 20-minute popcorn variety airmass thunderstorms. So it is probably just bad luck.

Or, a second thought is that there is some sort of other topography factor around that is triggering the storms in the wrong spot--maybe an urban area or even a big power plant/factory that helps initiate convection in the same spot consistently. There is a study that shows how the Atlanta metro area sees more rain downwind of the urban heat island--but Gainesville seems too small for any effect like that.

Or, a third thought is that the storms supposedly heading toward you and missing is an optical illusion. This has been documented also--it is part of the reason there are myths associated with storms always missing cities--they always look like they are heading towards you when they are on the horizon and then they appear to split or move away when they get closer when they are really following a straight line. This seems to even happen when radar watching if you fixate too much on the heaviest rain.

My hypothesis is 80-90% bad luck and maybe 10-20% some sort of topography issue that causes the seabreeze to consistently break the cap in the wrong spot.