Friday was our 2nd wettest day of 2011

Much-needed rain fell in central Virginia Friday, dumping on us for hours! Thankfully, most of these storms did not produce widespread wind damage, but there was frequent lightning (no lightning deaths were reported from this storm system) and torrential downpours. Here are the severe weather reports from Friday:

The blue dots on the map represent wind damage reports in Virginia as trees were downed in those locations from strong wind gusts. But the good news from that storm system came in the form of heavy rainfall (which we still need in parts of Virginia)! Here is the rainfall status update after last week's rain in Richmond:

Friday's rainfall put us above the normal for our month-to-date tally, and it was our second wettest single day of 2011! Currently, the wettest day of this year is May 14th, when 1.74" fell at Richmond International Airport. We came very close to that day on Friday!
And here's some more good news...the latest long-range drought outlook for Virginia shows that our drought conditions will continue to improve through the end of Summer:


--Meteorologist Carrie Rose