This photo was taken by Sebastian Spiegl around Yorktown last night.  It was a beautiful picture of lightning.  We had some rough weather on the Peninsula and Middle Peninsula.  We had reports of 1″ hail around Claremont in Surry County and in Grafton in York county.  We also had some trees down in the Williamsburg area.  With that said I have to talk about the lack of rainfall over the Southside and Northeast North Carolina.  Yesterday was amazing!  We had the most unstable atmosphere that I have seen since I began working here.  There was only one other instance that I can remember.  This caused some of the severe weather on the Peninsula.  However, the rain just dissapeared once it moved into the Southside.  We had a watch up last night for the area, but it didn’t pan out.  For the junior meteorologists out there: The CAPE (instability) was up to 3500.  The Lifted Index (LI) was -8.  That is huge.  That is the type of weather that stormchasers look for out in the Plains states.  The lifted index is the difference in temperature between a parcel of air lifted from the ground up to 500mb versus the actual temperature at that pressure level.  The warmer it is at the surface compared to up high, the more unstable it is.  Negative numbers mean unstable.  -2 to -4 is pretty unstable.  -8 is very rare in the Mid Atlantic.  However, dry air mixed in with the westerly winds.  Plus, I think the strong wind off the mountains created a cap.  So my forecast didn’t pan out on the southside, but it did on the Peninsula. 

  Anyway, the weather pattern has broken.  Cooler drier air has moved on in.  We’ll see a lot of this today:

Sunshine!  A few high thin clouds with highs in the 70s.  Chance for showers tomorrow and much cooler. Highs in the lower 60s.  Temps may actually drop back to the upper 50s for a while.  The good thing is that I doubt we’ll see any storms.  Big changes.  Happy mother’s day!

Meteorologist: Jeremy Wheeler