LAFAYETTE, IN — Severe thunderstorms and possible F4 tornadoes were the talk of the town Wednesday, prompting some businesses around Greater Lafayette to close early and people to prepare for the worst.
But the storms never developed.
On Thursday morning, Tippecanoe Emergency Management Director Jeff Houston described Wednesday’s severe storm predictions as a bust and said they closed the emergency center about 8 p.m. Wednesday and sent everyone home.
It begs the question: What happened?
The short answer is that the first round of rain Wednesday afternoon was supposed to arrive in the morning, National Weather Service meteorologist Jason Puma said. Because the rain arrived later in the day, it kept the warm front south of the Lafayette area.
“That shifted our boundary a little bit further south to southern and southwestern Indiana and essentially helped to make things a little more stable across the Lafayette area in northwest Indiana,” Puma said.
“When that occurred, our focus went further south, and that’s where we had several tornadoes occur in Clay County, in Owen County and towards Monroe County,” Puma said. The National Weather Service has survey teams in the area on Thursday checking on the damage.
“Because of that little bit of change, things got shifted further south out of your area.”
Shifting weather patterns happen all the time, Puma said, illustrating that heavy snowfalls predicted for an area often change because a storm takes a different track.
“Stuff like that happens all the time in meteorology, especially when we’re trying to estimate 24 to 48 hours ahead of time precisely where the most impactful weather might be,” Puma said. “In this case, the most impactful storms, instead of being in northwestern Indiana, they ended up being kind of in west-central and southwest-central Indiana.”
National Weather Service records from the Purdue University Airport indicated that the area received 1.79 inches of rain Wednesday night.
To say the area is having a rainy June is an understatement.
Lafayette has had 7.72 inches of rain this month, Puma said. That’s 5.52 inches above normal.
The U.S. Drought Monitor updates every Thursday, and Tippecanoe County has spent part of the year in some state of drought, but not now.
On June 18, the drought monitor for the Midwest showed that there are no drought conditions in all of Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.
Reach Ron Wilkins at rwilkins@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @RonWilkins2.
This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: Mother Nature doesn’t mess with Lafayette but pummels southern Indiana
Reporting by Ron Wilkins, Lafayette Journal & Courier / Lafayette Journal & Courier
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Ron Wilkins, Lafayette Journal & Courier | USA TODAY Network
