A look back at yesterday’s storms

Showers and thunderstorms made their way through the Weather First area on Thursday, bringing heavy rain to most of the area and damaging winds to others.

In terms of severe weather, most of it in our local area stayed south of the Minnesota/Iowa border. Severe storms began to develop just south of Floyd county around 6PM. Around 7PM Charles City was struck by these severe storms producing damaging winds that damaged trees and left parts of the city without power.

The storms then continued northeast, where they grew into a linear line of thunderstorms across Howard, Mitchell, Mower and Fillmore counties. Further severe thunderstorm warnings were issued for heavy wind, with a few damaging wind reports coming out of Fillmore county as well.

These storms fired before the main line of thunderstorms, which allowed them to become severe due to plentiful energy in the atmosphere available that was not yet being tapped into by the main line of storms. This is often the case with severe weather outbreaks, where thunderstorms develop ahead of the main line and end up producing more severe weather then the main line itself.

Fortunately, wind damage was not widespread across the entire Weather First area.

Rain totals Thursday generally fell anywhere from 0.50″ to about 1.5″ across the viewing area, with isolated locations receiving more. Thankfully, we weren’t in the same boat as the city of Winona though! They received a staggering 4.63″ of rain in just a matter of two to three hours. This led to flash flooding across portions of the Winona area.

The rain we saw yesterday certainly has kept us ahead of schedule in terms of monthly, seasonal and yearly rainfall for Rochester. The city is now 0.93″ of rain above average for August, 6.01″ above average for the season, and 5.71″ above average for the year. The yearly rainfall for the city now stands at 31.14″ of rain.