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E PA/NJ/DE Summer 2020 OBS Thread


Rtd208
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11 minutes ago, Hurricane Agnes said:

Mesonet in New Castle reporting about 4.06" of rain in 30 minutes. :o

Annotation 2020-08-07 185628.jpg

For reference, going back to 1950, average rainfall for the month of August in Wilmington is 3.79”. So if this is accurate, we just saw over a month’s worth of rainfall in 30 minutes. Incredible. 

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45 minutes ago, BBasile said:

The lightning is wild right now.  This is only showing c2g strikes, but it's pretty much a strobe show.  So loud outside with the rain and thunder.  Crazy!  

Capture+_2020-08-07-18-59-32.png

I did go on and buy that lightning detector (was delivered Wednesday and I set it up yesterday) and I have been trying out the different sensitivities on it by changing the dip switches. I had gotten it to what seemed to be a reasonable setting after going from nothing with an obvious lightning flash to apparent interference signals (registering counts with nothing on radar), but with the current setting over the past 2 1/2 hours, I've registered 327 strikes.  I was initially thinking maybe I'm getting some interference and false hits, but a couple live lightning maps were verifying it and it didn't start registering anything until around 5:15 pm today, with the current setting configured yesterday afternoon and nothing registering after that until this storm today. It has finally settled down in the past 20 minutes.

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53 minutes ago, RedSky said:

KDIX radar is under estimating totals big time

 

I'm going with the 6.40" in the gauge here, I saw somewhere that someone measured a rate of 12" per hour at one point.

Anyway, when we created this rock area out back, in 2014, we put a 6" pipe in to handle non-heavy rainfalls, and figured that the "3 year flood" would just overflow and run across the grass. We contoured the grass so the water would be spread out over a 40 to 50' wide area. It's worked pretty well overall, except we seem to get 2 or 3  "3 year floods" a year now. Up until today we had never had a single rock wash out onto the grass, at the most some debris from the woods (like Tuesday). This rain today was so far beyond anything we anticipated, I don't think we could have designed for it. First pic, my son was having some fun in it, lol. 2nd pic is during the rain. 3rd pic is the aftermath. Those are river rocks out on the grass, some of them are 8 or 9" long. Guess I won't be mowing there for a few days.Rain-Fun-8-07-20.thumb.jpg.ebd7919feb13b7b1da35101b4d2cfc43.jpg

Rain-8-07-20.thumb.jpg.efd138c464095db8046bcb5a530215dd.jpg

Rain-aftermath-8-07-20.thumb.jpg.5fb761c74915f719b18dff65c75db7e9.jpg

 

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3 hours ago, KamuSnow said:

I'm going with the 6.40" in the gauge here, I saw somewhere that someone measured a rate of 12" per hour at one point.

Anyway, when we created this rock area out back, in 2014, we put a 6" pipe in to handle non-heavy rainfalls, and figured that the "3 year flood" would just overflow and run across the grass. We contoured the grass so the water would be spread out over a 40 to 50' wide area. It's worked pretty well overall, except we seem to get 2 or 3  "3 year floods" a year now. Up until today we had never had a single rock wash out onto the grass, at the most some debris from the woods (like Tuesday). This rain today was so far beyond anything we anticipated, I don't think we could have designed for it. First pic, my son was having some fun in it, lol. 2nd pic is during the rain. 3rd pic is the aftermath. Those are river rocks out on the grass, some of them are 8 or 9" long. Guess I won't be mowing there for a few days.Rain-Fun-8-07-20.thumb.jpg.ebd7919feb13b7b1da35101b4d2cfc43.jpg

Rain-8-07-20.thumb.jpg.efd138c464095db8046bcb5a530215dd.jpg

Rain-aftermath-8-07-20.thumb.jpg.5fb761c74915f719b18dff65c75db7e9.jpg

 

Kamu's butt surfing paradise lol

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4 hours ago, Hurricane Agnes said:

I did go on and buy that lightning detector (was delivered Wednesday and I set it up yesterday) and I have been trying out the different sensitivities on it by changing the dip switches. I had gotten it to what seemed to be a reasonable setting after going from nothing with an obvious lightning flash to apparent interference signals (registering counts with nothing on radar), but with the current setting over the past 2 1/2 hours, I've registered 327 strikes.  I was initially thinking maybe I'm getting some interference and false hits, but a couple live lightning maps were verifying it and it didn't start registering anything until around 5:15 pm today, with the current setting configured yesterday afternoon and nothing registering after that until this storm today. It has finally settled down in the past 20 minutes.

Good to see it's working.  I assume that it detects all lightning, IC and CG strikes?

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8 hours ago, BBasile said:

Good to see it's working.  I assume that it detects all lightning, IC and CG strikes?

The way the docs were written, it is detecting EMPs and has some kind of filtering algorithm to try to filter out common electronic source pulses.  It's an Ambient Weather sensor (manufactured by Fine Offset for companies like Ecowitt, Ambient Weather, and a few others) for a couple models of their weather stations.  Ambient literally only made it available about a month ago and they are still tweaking the firmware for the station dashboard to include it and to publish on their public PWS site.

https://www.ambientweather.com/amwh31l.html

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Just as a what-the-hell look at all the lightning from yesterday's storm and the data that was available about it yesterday, I did some screenshots last night from lightningmaps.org (checking off the option to also include Blitzortung.org's data) -

(1) screen cap of the 1 hr period shown on lightningmap.org (between ~7:30 pm EDT - ~8:30 pm EDT)

(2) screen cap of the 24 hr period shown on lightningmap.org (including the same time frame as #1 and if you look closely, there are gray boxes with white numbers indicating the estimated number of strikes in those areas, which was an option that could be selected for view)

(3) screen cap of the Ambient sensor shown for a 24 hour period (~6:00 am EDT 8/7/20 - ~6:00 am EDT 8/8/20) highlighting the peak time of strikes, with the upper curve representing the cumulative number of strikes and the  lower one showing the strike rate

(4) screen cap of the same as #3 but showing the data for the past week (the station was setup and operational on 8/1/20 and the sensor on 8/6/20)

I think for normal thunderstorms you get some tiny spike lines here and there, with maybe a few sharp peaks if the storms go on a bit longer (although looking at that data over a week or month's interval, any peak will get compressed into a spike).  But yesterday seems to have been nuts. 

As a disclaimer, I've only had this thing for a couple days and am still tweaking the location and sensitivity and whatnot.  It supposedly has a range of detection up to about 25 miles, and it's not actually measuring the exact location of the strike but supposedly the distance from the sensor to the boundary of where the strikes are occurring and the sensor is supposedly directional (so unless way up high away from obstructions, it might miss some occurring in certain directions). However depending on the atmospheric conditions, it has been apparently found to pick up strikes from further away (at least per some people who have been testing the Ecowitt version earlier this year). One downside of it is that it only has an operational temp range of 32F - 122F, meaning it is not really a cold-weather device, and around here, we get can get convection in the winter, including thundersnow on occasion. So I do have it inside near a window at the moment (and there are dip switch settings for it to designate whether it is "inside" or "outside", which will alter the sensitivity thresholds, although you can set it for "outside" even if it is "inside" or vice versa, if threshold sensitivities need to be optimized).  Some of those who have been using them outside generally have reported placing them in a dry location, although a few actually put them in some kind of vented enclosure that fits similarly-sized temp/humidity sensors, if not placed in an attic or under a roof eave/gable or porch, etc.

In any case, will be seeing how things go with this geek add-on sensor and considering we really didn't have many thunderstorms last year, at least so far this year, I seem to have lucked out with some this week to test it/tweak it. :lol:

lighntingmaps.org-past-1hr-837pm-08072020.PNG

lighntingmaps.org-past-24hrs-833pm-08072020.PNG

Annotation 2020-08-08 060725-peak-lighnting-strikes-08072020.jpg

Annotation 2020-08-08 060725-peak-lighnting-strikes-week-08082020.jpg

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