When I say that it is the Year of the Insane Weather, I don't mean "sweet senile grandma" insane. I mean "creepy guy who follows you around the grocery store and talks to people who aren't there" insane. Between the time I started college in August and now, I've experienced a hurricane, damn near 60 thunderstorms, several feet of rain, a blizzard, never ending hailstorm and an almost-tornado. Let's start in August...
August - October
I had never been to the Gulf Coast before I came to college, so I wasn't exactly prepared for the near-constant thunderstorms. Every day in August and September, and almost every other day in October, we had at least 2 or 3 thunderstorms a day. Mobile, AL gets an average of 5 feet of rain a year, and now I understand how that's possible.
November
Just when we thought that the hurricane season appeared to be a bust, Hurricane Ida decided to pay Mobile a visit.
January
Back in Mobile for Spring semester, I thought that I would be done with the exciting weather until tornado season started. Nope. On January 21, 2010 we had a large thunderstorm set up over Mobile, and it didn't move until midnight. It dropped just over 7 inches of rain on us in 12 hours. Walked to class in the middle of it and ruined my history books.
(Flooding at the student center around 1PM)
I took this video around 930 at night in one of the heaviest parts of the storm:
February
February saw the first snowstorm Mobile, AL had seen in 16 years. We got about a half inch of snow, but it was enough to paralyze the area for the day.
March - April
Nothing really exciting happened the rest of the time I was in Alabama. I came home to VA in mid-May.
May - June
May began the month from hell with thunderstorms. The first storm came on May 14, with the largest hailstorm I'd ever seen. We had quarter-to-ping-pong-ball sized hail for 10 minutes. No damage, thankfully, but it was noisy as hell.
The second storm came on June 3, 2010 with extremely strong winds. A Weatherbug station nearby recorded a wind gust of 67 miles per hour in the height of the storm.
The third storm came a few days later on June 6, 2010. A tornado warning had been issued for a few counties to our south. I was at my aunt's house near the county line when the storm came overhead. My mom and I were on the deck and noticed a tight rotation directly above our heads. Of course, the first thing I did was lunged for my camera. The National Weather Service used this footage in an official report of theirs, documenting wind damage just south of our location.
Nothing else has happened since then, but there are still two months until August to round out the Year of the Insane Weather...
Just when we thought that the hurricane season appeared to be a bust, Hurricane Ida decided to pay Mobile a visit.
The storm would eventually weaken into a strong tropical storm before making landfall just south of the college. My roommate, our friend and I did the smart thing and went out into the thick of it:
December
The last few winters in Northern Virginia had been pitiful, to put it nicely. A few inches of snow here, a slight glazing of ice there, nothing really memorable. Well, that changed a few days before Christmas. Models predicted a large snowstorm hitting the DC area, and instead of trending the snow totals down like they usually do, the totals trended upwards. A week before the storm it was 3-6" of snow. Then it was 6-8". Then 8-12". Then they wouldn't commit to anything except for "over a foot possible." Then the day before the storm it was 12-18". The night the snow started falling they settled on their final totals of 24-36" of snow. We were on the bottom end of that, at 24.5" of snow with 3-4 foot drifts.
January
Back in Mobile for Spring semester, I thought that I would be done with the exciting weather until tornado season started. Nope. On January 21, 2010 we had a large thunderstorm set up over Mobile, and it didn't move until midnight. It dropped just over 7 inches of rain on us in 12 hours. Walked to class in the middle of it and ruined my history books.
(Flooding at the student center around 1PM)
I took this video around 930 at night in one of the heaviest parts of the storm:
February
February saw the first snowstorm Mobile, AL had seen in 16 years. We got about a half inch of snow, but it was enough to paralyze the area for the day.
March - April
Nothing really exciting happened the rest of the time I was in Alabama. I came home to VA in mid-May.
May - June
May began the month from hell with thunderstorms. The first storm came on May 14, with the largest hailstorm I'd ever seen. We had quarter-to-ping-pong-ball sized hail for 10 minutes. No damage, thankfully, but it was noisy as hell.
The second storm came on June 3, 2010 with extremely strong winds. A Weatherbug station nearby recorded a wind gust of 67 miles per hour in the height of the storm.
The third storm came a few days later on June 6, 2010. A tornado warning had been issued for a few counties to our south. I was at my aunt's house near the county line when the storm came overhead. My mom and I were on the deck and noticed a tight rotation directly above our heads. Of course, the first thing I did was lunged for my camera. The National Weather Service used this footage in an official report of theirs, documenting wind damage just south of our location.
Nothing else has happened since then, but there are still two months until August to round out the Year of the Insane Weather...
= Tornado Warning
= Severe T'storm Warning
= Flash Flood Warning
