Storm Warning

At 6:30 pm last night the National Weather Service issued a storm warning for our part of the world.

On a map, the places listed look like this. The tan ones are the named locations and the white one is us.

Most storms in the area travel northeast so, yes indeed, we are in the path of that storm warning. So we checked the radar. The arrow points to our location.

And the view out our window looks like this. Note Dave holding his hand over our weather radio to muffle the storm warning announcement a bit. Otherwise, it is loud enough to wake the dead.

It looks like we’ll have a thunderstorm passing on each side of us but not directly overhead so we decide to wait and see.

After a bit the radar says yes we are in the thunderstorm warning area but, as we predicted, the actual storms are passing on either side of us.

And the view out our window still looks like this. And the weather radio is silent.

Suddenly a red box appears on our radar. Someone thinks they saw a tornado!

But that box is east of us and it is traveling northeast and no new warning is issued for our area. And the sky outside our window does not have the greenish look that says tornado to us. And the last line on the original warning says they are not calling out the early warning storm watchers which means they did not expect any tornadoes to develop in this storm. So we can’t help but wonder what it is that someone thought they saw.

The storm warning passed and the tornado box moved further east.

And the most we got was some fairly heavy rain.

No hail. No 60 mph winds. Just rain.

Dave and I, having lived in the Minneapolis area for 60 years and 45 years respectively, do a pretty good job of reading weather forecasts for this area. We can judge pretty well when we need to go to a storm shelter and when it’s safe to wait. We don’t try to do that for other parts of the world and we don’t recommend newcomers to our area wait.

But, we are safe once again.

TTYL,

Linda