The Weather Observer

Thanks to daytime heating we had some very powerful storms in the Petersburg area on the 09th of July. This storms did produce an EF1 tornado, with a roof blown off a warehouse at the intersection of farmer street and fairgrounds road, in the western section of Petersburg. Extensive damage to the warehouse, utility poles and power lines down in the vicinity. A storm survey has been conducted at the site, and the damage has been assessed as an EF1 tornado. The tornado touched down briefly with a width of 30 yards and a path length of approximately 60 yards. No fatalities or injuries were reported. The tornado photo was taken by Jeff Seymour. More information can be found at the NWS office of Wakefield, VA website.

Just like always I change my website about once a month. Normally it is with a new theme or changing the layout, but this time it is a whole re-design. I found a great program called Joomla. It is almost like a combination of php-nuke and wordpress. There are a lot more things I can do with the website to make it look professional with joomla and still have the ability to add articles just like wordpress.

Still working on the test site but thought it was time to open to the public and see what everyone thought. You can check out the work in progress at: www.theweatherobserver.com/test/. Feel free to post any comments/suggestions on this post so I can get some great feed back and make the site better. The Weather Observer is something that I spend a lot of time working on and try to make it user friendly. I will take all the comments and make the site better so do not hold back with anything.

Richmond topped out at 100 degrees yesterday breaking the old record of 99 for the date of 1984. This is a far cry from the temperatures from March to May that was one of the coolest on record. Temperatures averaged 51.4 during that period. The high temperatures combined with ozone prompted the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to issue Code Orange alerts for Richmond and the surrounding areas.

Nothing like a late evening tornado warning to get you to wake up. The kids and I were sitting at home watching some new episodes of Spongebob when the weather radio went off. Just like always my kids run over to find out what is happening. Imagine our surprise when there was a tornado warning for Chesterfield county. I quickly pull up the stormlab radar and see what is happening. Image on the left is at the top of the watch, check out storm H2.

My computer is set up to give audio alarms after certain parameters are reached and one of them is a Tornado Vortex signature. When we had the tornado touch down in Colonial Heights a couple of weeks ago it caught it. Last night no such warning was seen. Because of the threat of severe weather I had a couple of different radar images open and was able to see the rotation on the Doppler (image on the right). The system continued to move to the North East and nothing happened here. A storm report this morning said there were trees snapped off near the hull street police station and trees down in the Wood lake subdivision. Rated as an EF-0. Ptah width of 20 yards and a path length of one quarter mile, (37.43N by -77.64W). Tornado was reported about 18.6 miles from The Weather Observer Headquarters. Below is a map of the site and TWO Headquarters.